We're told the article is written "by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in collaboration with American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami."
The article contains an amazing — and amazingly wrong — assertion: "Every one of us descends from an astounding number of recent ancestors: two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 great great grandparents, 32 third great grandparents and 64 fourth great grandparents — that’s 126 unique ancestors through two parents. Go back to our 12th great grandparents, and everyone has a whopping 32,766 forebears."
As if the 32,766 positions on the family tree are always — and for everyone — going to be 32,766 different individuals! I think it's unlikely that anyone has 32,766 different individuals on a family tree going back to the 12th great grandparents.
The terms for this very well known issue is "pedigree collapse."
Here's Steven Pinker writing about pedigree collapse in "Strangled by Roots" (TNR, in 2007):
Exponential functions quickly explode to unimaginable magnitudes or peter out to infinitesimal ones, and the inability of our intuition to keep track of them leads to many paradoxes of kinship. In an old Smothers Brothers routine, Tommy explained why the population explosion is a myth. We have two parents, he noted, and four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on. The further back you go, the more ancestors you have. So, he concluded, "The population isn't growing--it's tapering off!" Like many of their jokes, this one depends on a subtle truth. If you assume twenty-five years per generation, you can calculate that you had around three billion ancestors at the time of the signing of the Magna Carta, one hundred billion during the Norman invasion, two quintillion at the fall of the Roman Empire, and around 1,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 at the birth of Jesus....
The paradox is resolved by the realization that our ancestors must have married their cousins of various distances and removes, so that vast numbers of the slots in one's family tree are filled by the same individuals. Imagine, in an extreme case, that your parents were first cousins. Then two of your great-grandparents on your mother's side would also be your great-grandparents on your father's side--you would have six great-grandparents instead of eight. Genealogists call this "pedigree collapse": the necessity that as you trace your family tree backward, it will fan out for a number of generations until it begins to encompass most of the people in the available population, whereupon it falls back on itself, coinciding with the original growth of that population.... This chronic incest, by the way, did not turn our ancestors into the cast of Deliverance....
The jiggle of the family tree is huge and communal. Here's Jack Kerouac having a word to say about the pope in "Dharma Bums":
Throughout all these parties I always stole off for a nap under the eucalyptus trees.... One afternoon as I just gazed at the topmost branches of those immensely tall trees I began to notice that the uppermost twigs and leaves were lyrical happy dancers glad that they had been apportioned the top, with all that rumbling experience of the whole tree swaying beneath them making their dance, their every jiggle, a huge and communal and mysterious necessity dance, and so just floating up there in the void dancing the meaning of the tree. I noticed how the leaves almost looked human the way they bowed and then leaped up and then swayed lyrically side to side. It was a crazy vision in my mind but beautiful. Another time under those trees I dreamt I saw a purple throne all covered with gold, some kind of Eternity Pope or Patriarch in it, and Rosie somewhere, and at that moment Cody was in the shack yakking to some guys and it seemed that he was to the left of this vision as some kind of Archangel, and when I opened my eyes I saw it was only the sun against my eyelids. And as I say, that hummingbird, a beautiful little blue hummingbird no bigger than a dragonfly, kept making a whistling jet dive at me, definitely saying hello to me, every day, usually in the morning, and I always yelled back at him a greeting. Finally he began to hover in the open window of the shack, buzzing there with his furious wings, looking at me beadily, then, flash, he was gone. That California humming guy.
Posts
76 comments:
"Henry Louis Gates Jr. is amazingly wrong"
We knew this before he beclowned himself in race hoaxsterism.
Best in Show!
So is the Pope black? This is a very American hang up. When I got my 23 and me results, I looked for Turkish, Jewish and Armenian ancestors and found none. I did find a couple of Italians and one Romanian.
I once met a Chinese man who could trace is lineage all the way back to the Tang Dynasty. Showed me the paperwork and everything. Legit. People think they care about genealogy, but they don't care about it like some people who don't outsource the task to a 3rd party. This guy and his family had been doing the heavy lifting of documentation in a family register for 1400 years.
Infinitely more impressive.
"I think it's unlikely that anyone has 32,766 different individuals on a family tree going back to the 12th great grandparents."
and for arabs and pakistaniis?
how many different individuals would THEIR tree have at 12th great grands?
24? or 48?
@Spiros, someone once sent lizard blood to 23andme and got back results that showed they were 96% R1b/a (European) and 4% Ashkenazi. True Story.
And to think that lizard's genes will now be sold to the highest bidder...talk about pedigree collapse!
How can a pet lizard fill up the spit tube?
my mom's cousin traced their grandparent (my great) back to a Norwegian King..
Which then (supposedly) went back to Julius Caesar..
Which was IMPRESSIVE, since i didn't think Julius Caesar had any kids..
Also, when you looked at the tree, it was clear that we were either:
the offspring of some Norwegian minor royal (and thus the King)..
OR
the PROPERTY of some Norwegian minor royal
I think about this A LOT, when i hear folk talk about "oral history"
WHY would you believe ANYONE'S "oral history", if you've seen what passes for WRITTEN History (which is usually crap)
Simply having a distant black ancestor doesn't make you black, unless we are going back to the "one drop" rule. Which we apparently are.
Years ago, before I thought it through, more's the pity, I got Ancestry DNA test kits for our kids for Christmas. Turns out our daughter, and she alone, has some small percentage of Asian ancestry - welcome to the family, Genghis Khan (I assume). She has, in addition, the greatest percentage of Scandihoovian among us (oh, that beautiful skin). Our oldest is almost 100% the product of the British Isles, and our youngest is a mutt like me, though he is the spit of his father, as folks used to say.
I was there and conscious at both conception and birth of all three, and when they left my hospital room for whatever vaccination or test or whatever, my husband went with them - I am very certain they're all ours. DNA is interesting.
But this attempt to find proper ancestry in the Pope smacks of patents of nobility, doesn't it? I don't do prodictions very often, but maybe I'll try this one: some eager genealogist is going to "find" a grandfather or someone who, though he dutifully contributed progeny, preferred the company of men, and particularly one dear friend. And, somewhere back there, there will be an ancestress (assigned at birth, or discovery) who, family lore will have it, climbed trees and rode astride.
I’ll tell you who has an “oral history”: Stormy Daniels.
…and so Pope something something with Luis Boucher something something with Angelina Jolie in Kung Fu Panda with James Hong in R.I.P.D with Kevin Bacon…
Spiros said, "How can a pet lizard fill up the spit tube?"
The same way a recalcitrant cat is placed in pet carrier...very carefully and extreme patience.
Northern Europeans were killed off at a great rate in a series of plagues, I guess from 1000 AD to maybe 1500. So all "northern Europeans" today are descended from a fairly small number of people. Of course there have been infusions of "others," increasing the number of ancestors a bit.
One epitaph for homo sapiens: incest doesn't turn us into the cast of Deliverance. We know, we've tried.
Another: deliberate killing of each other doesn't necessarily accomplish a great deal, but somehow it feels good.
At least one of my ancestors died from driving his wagon off a bridge. Others were draft dodgers, because as Bavarian Catholics they weren't particularly interested in being cannon fodder because the Prussians wanted to holiday in Alsace-Lorraine. I assume if you traced it back far enough, one of my ancestors is Charlemagne or Charles Martel, or both. And all y'all in the comment section are likely distant cousins. Enjoy the family reunion!
I have always wondered how 23andme determines where to draw the line regarding the percentages of genes. Exactly when do your ancestors become "Swedish" or "Irish" or "Ukrainian" or "Nigerian", and how do you break that down to percentages? If in fact we are all descended from common African predecessors, isn't the percentage thing fairly arbitrary?
In one of his docs, Gates castigates Dominicans for identifying more with their European rather than their African ancestry. Completely missing how his interpretation of their history could sound to a Dominican today. For 200 Alex. Why is an American telling me what my identity ought to be?
"And for Arabs and Pakistanis?"
There was a time (and it's still true today among the descendants of Abdulaziz bin Saud) Muslim leaders usually claimed descent from Muhammad as the primary justification of their regimes. There was a degree of plausibility in those claims. Besides his acknowledged wives, Muhammad kept hundreds of women in bondage as concubines and sex slaves. Many of them became pregnant by their captor and at least some of those pregnancies resulted in children who lived to reproduce, often taking as sexual partners other descendants of that foundational harem who in turn fought and often killed their fellow descendants of Muhammad in the largely permanent state of theocratic civil war over the caliphate.
Also--try to find a person of Irish ancestry who isn't a descendant of Brian Boru.
They "married" their first cousins ..or worse.
Southern, one liner, generational collapse joke: "But, Darlene, if we get a divorce will we still be cousins?"
Did Gates Jr write for The Rolling Stones?
I see a red door
And I want it painted black
No colors anymore
I want them to turn black
skip was always a fool, less so then houston baker or stanley fish but still a fool
"I have always wondered how 23andme determines where to draw the line regarding the percentages of genes."
They don't. They make it up as they go along. They always did. Their fraud predates Theranos, and now their fake results along with millions of people actual DNA are for sale to the highest bidder.
You get fake results. 23andme gets money. An indeterminate entity/ties gets your genome. Priceless.
Well, there it is: The pope is running for a position in the Democratic Party.
Genie-ology is a nice hobby for post menopausal women. I've told this before. My last name is old money blue blood. All my aunties wanted to know how close we were too the famous family, so as the remaining paterfamilias, I took a DNA test and found out we had no blue blood. Rather, our ancestors were a long line of white trash whom left a baby (my great great great grandfather) on their betters porch.
Probably a common occurrence back in the day. Reminds me of a memorable line from Oliver Stone's JFK: "How do you know who your daddy is? Because your mama told you so"
Related by more than marriage, as Imus said of the Royals.
Genealogy is a big thing in my family, and I gave a number of relatives who are always digging up interesting things in the family tree. They tend to not go much more than four or five generations back, however. As one uncle put it, going back much further beyond five generations or so starts to feel more like “cousin’s roommate’s stepmother’s dentist” territory.
We’ve found plenty of interesting stories and even some intriguing mysteries just within that 4-5 generation range.
I've always been a firm believer in the distant-cousinhood of all Mankind, but it seems we're even more distant than we thought, with new subspecies popping up everywhere.
Most people can trace their ancestors back to some small village or area in South America, Europe or Africa. And the people that village intermarried with each other, and the other villages within about 5 miles. Occassionaly, some outsider (maybe a viking or foreign army) would come around but that was it.
Jews in Europe intermarried within an even smaller circle. Locked up in Ghettos and not wanting to socialize with the outside world.
My grandfather was related on the wrong side of the blanket to the Swedish royal family. They to the Norwegian royal family. Thus I to Gilbar. (see Gilbar 7:27] Talk about pedigree collapse.
I joined ancestry.com for a while because I wanted to solve a family mystery that existed at the great-grandfather/great-great grandfather level.
Then I was able to go up the tree and see various progenitors. I could feel my interest fading as I went back each generation. Once I got back more than 200 years, it was hard to see this person as different from any other person who lived back then. The percentage of "me" coming from him or her is virtually nothing. The necessity of their existence to mine is phenomenally important but also meaningless. Everything had to happen for this stuff that's happening now to be happening, and consider all the things that are not happening and that failed to happen centuries ago, why don't you?
Skip Gates himself suffers (now benefits) from the one drop rule. His father is even lighter, and Skip likes to talk about how his fellow old folks home residents didn’t know he was black.
I loved it when Skip told the Cambridge PD officer “I’ll talk to yo mama on the front porch!” I always thought he should do a series called “Skip Gates Talks to Yo Mama On The Front Porch.” The set would be a nice wraparound veranda with a glider and a pitcher of mint juleps, and Skip would interview the mothers of notable people. E.g, “Thank you, Mrs Robinson. And join me next week, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, when Skip Gates Talks To Yo Mama On The Front Porch!”
JSM
Jamie said...
I was there and conscious at both conception and birth of all three, and when they left my hospital room for whatever vaccination or test or whatever, my husband went with them - I am very certain they're all ours. DNA is interesting.
Those testing services aren't very reliable. Their DNA matching is based on samples they've collected that are largely self-reported, so you're at the mercy of what people have been told, or assume, about their ancestry.
The first of my new world relatives was Jean Ou Lanqueteau-Lanctôt, killed by the Iroquois on November 23, 1654, in Trois Rivers, Quebec. Lucky for me, he had a son, Francois, born that same year who went on to have eight children. I never thought I could work that nugget into an Althouse comment!
"I could feel my interest fading as I went back each generation....."
I signed up for FamilySearch a few years ago, which is a shared genealogy resource that links all of its users, and every once so often I get a note on some ancestor that's been connected up. It's run by the Mormons, and it's free. Usually they have weekly clinics at night at their local churches that anyone can attend, to get coaching on how to use the software, and how to search. I've never gone, but it's interesting to me to keep assembling our family tree. I've found I'm related to John Adams and Ben Franklin and Deacon Samuel Chapin, which I'm very sure is not anything particularly notable, except that it also means I'm related to Harry Chapin. But I've also found out a lot more about the ancestors that fought in the American Revolution and Civil wars, because the DAR and other groups actively use the site too, to add information. It's something I can pick up and set down, then pick up again, and I connect with my sister online to exchange information.
"The NYT informs in an article that seems mostly concerned with whether the Pope is — in some sense — black."
If the Pope is in some sense black, then 90% of DAS African Americans are in some sense white.
Ron Winkleheimer said...
Simply having a distant black ancestor doesn't make you black, unless we are going back to the "one drop" rule. Which we apparently are.
The “one drop” rule was an abomination when the KKK and Jim Crow Southerners, it’s an abomination today.
Take it from someone who had relatives living in South Chicago back in the 1950s and into the 1970s, there was a time when most (or all?) of it was home to white ethic enclaves — mostly southern European groups like Greeks, Serbs, Croatians, etc. They can stop trying to track down drops of black blood anytime they want. Even a race-baiting assh**e like Henry Gates won’t be able o shoehorn in what isn’t there.
Spiros said...
" When I got my 23 and me results, I looked for Turkish, Jewish and Armenian ancestors and found none. I did find a couple of Italians and one Romanian."
Paisan! Welcome to the Italian race, my bruthuh.
RideSpaceMountain said...
"I once met a Chinese man who could trace is lineage all the way back to the Tang Dynasty."
The Chinese genealogical records are astounding. At one point in time, the Chinese Communists saw the records as a threat, as they were one of the links to pre-Communist times, and destroyed some of them.
My paternal grandmother's family put together a genealogy in 1924 and my mother, inspired by Roots, put together her side in the 70s. It was fairly easy since all my grandparents grew up on farms, descendants of farmers, and didn't move around alot.
Many years ago I did the Ancestry test. Over perhaps 18 months they sent me results three times [all on the same dime]. The first two times some things looked right but the German percentage was obviously wrong.
The third time the Krauts clocked in at 17% which is what I was looking for since three GG Grandparents came over in the 1850s from Wolfschlugen, Baden-Württemberg. The rest, based on GGGs seemed pretty good. They got the Scots, Scots-Irish and Welsh and even a pinch of Danish—my family name crossed the Channel in 1066. But about 40% was classified as British, or, UK mutts.
I don't think the DNA tests are completely bullshit. I might do it again to see if their data has improved.
boatbuilder said...
"I have always wondered how 23andme determines where to draw the line regarding the percentages of genes. Exactly when do your ancestors become "Swedish" or "Irish" or "Ukrainian" or "Nigerian", and how do you break that down to percentages? If in fact we are all descended from common African predecessors, isn't the percentage thing fairly arbitrary?"
I can't speak for 23andme specifically, but generally the DNA sites compare your DNA to populatation groups and calculate how much you have in common. So it's not really an ethnicity calculation. For example, on Ancestry, my German and French fall into a broad "Western European" group rather than a more granular breakdown.
The DNA of Africans and non-Africans started to diverge as early as 80,000 years ago. Just as the DNA of non-Africans mutated and changed to some degree, the same is true of Africans as well. The overall DNA of a Ugandan is just as different from the common ancestor of an Ukranian and the overall Ukranian's DNA is diferent from the same common ancestor of the Ugandan. The different environments merely put selective pressure on different genes.
Some distant relative on my mother's side lived in Germany in the 1930s and traced that side of the family to a duke of Mecklenburg. But...this ancestor was born on the wrong side of the blanket, as they used to say. This duke's progeny was apparently of excellent character and was awarded the surname of "von Mecklenburg." A few years back my daughter and grandson visited "our" castle.
Aggie said...I signed up for FamilySearch a few years ago...It's run by the Mormons, and it's free."
I don't understand why they have a free site and also have one that charges hefty fees. I did look at the site and there is some erroneous information about my dad.
I remember a post here some time ago about Jonathan Franzen giving himself permission to skip the “begats” in the Bible because it was like reading the phone book. I wonder how he feels about Chinese genealogies?
I’ll have to check my info. I know I’m related to all those others listed.
I did Ancestry.com about 10 years ago, and it told me I am 1% sub-saharan African - not the West African region that most people were enslaved from, but farther interior and south, Congolese/Bantu.
Since then, I have been checking the block on the appropriate forms, and singing every word of my favorite gangsta rap tracks.
Just kidding on that last bit. But more seriously, if the 1% is true, it stands for about 7 generations back (2^7=128). And it would have to be on my father's side: I got my mom to spit in the tube before she passed, and her chart shows no African ancestry. I never got my father or any relatives on his side to do DNA analysis, so I can only guess based on paper genealogy.
My father's father's people originated in Scotland, came to North Carolina in the 1780s, and kept moving northwest as free small farmers, ending up in Iowa. It's possible they picked up the black ancestry somewhere on that path, but it would more likely have been West African.
My father's mother's people were Quebeckers. I don't know much beyond that. French-speakers tend to do everyone and proudly incorporate the progeny (see, e.g, Creoles and the Dumas family), so I could see black ancestry getting blended into the family without much fuss. The Southern/Interior African thing is still a bit puzzling, though. Maybe some weird Belgian/French commercial tie.
Nothing in family lore about black ancestry, of course. Once my father's mother's people came into the US, that wouldn't be something one talked about. And my father's father's taciturn Scots wouldn't have talked about it either, if it were on their side. Free Northern farmers were abolitionist for economic reasons, not out of great one-on-one love of blacks.
I imagine the stress of "passing" echoed down my family culture in various ways. That's my justification for checking the AA/biracial block.
Of course, this is all sound and fury signifying nothing if the 1% is just some error at Ancestry Labs....
JSM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syrLyA5uD84
My first thought was that 126 is wrong -- unless you come from [insert name of place you want to insult as inbred] -- but I see what Gates was saying now.
Quebec has very good records. So does New England. They also started out with relatively small populations, so over time everyone was likely to be related to everyone else. It's a "bottleneck" so everyone is related to everyone else, however distantly.
There was a controversy a few years back. Many men went from France to Quebec, but fewer women did. One conclusion was that the men must have married Indian women, and that every French Canadian must be part Indian. Some are, but more likely, the men died or went back to France.
@BG, the free-use part of FamilySearch is you, being the product the Mormons are after. If you happen to find erroneous information there - and this happens quite a bit, bad linkages and so on - then you can notify them and supply the correction. I've seen the subscription part offered but have never been tempted. It apparently supports searches that can yield a lot more information on family branches and so forth, so probably costs something for them to support it. I've noticed there are a lot of professional genealogists that seem to make use of it.
Sending my DNA out for analysis gives me the creeps, and I've never done it. I've read too much about people that have done this and found to their dismay that their genes have been harvested for something or another in medical research. Ugh.
john mosby said...
"I did Ancestry.com about 10 years ago, and it told me I am 1% sub-saharan African - not the West African region that most people were enslaved from, but farther interior and south, Congolese/Bantu.
DNA testing is not a measure of ethnicity/race, but a measure of how much DNA you have in common with other groups. As we are all homo sapiens (and we're surprisingly non genetically diverse compared to other species), it's no surprise that we will end up having small snippets of DNA in common.
"Of course, this is all sound and fury signifying nothing if the 1% is just some error at Ancestry Labs...."
The ethnicity/race estimates are just that - estimates. I treat anything under about 5% as a possible rounding error.
If I truly was descended from every ethnic group that has popped up in small percentages on my DNA tests/updates, I would be a veritable UN all on my own.
For a decade beginning in 1663, nearly 800 Filles du Roi (Daughters of the King), aged 16 to 40, were sent to New France and instructed to marry—quickly.
DNA doesn't lie, but it doesn't tell you everything. And sometimes it tells things someone doesn't (or didn't) want anyone to know. Like when my half-nephew did his DNA and I found I had a previously unknown half-sister. A lot of close relatives of his have family trees online- and so far, he and all those people have not contacted me back though Ancestry messaging shows they've read my messages...
As for those elaborate and well kept Chinese records- I wouldn't count on their accuracy. Same with a friend of mine who had records going back centuries showing his Jewish ancestors and the priestly line he belonged to. None of them account for 12th great-grandmother Smith having a one night fling... or the local Baron having his way with, well, whoever falls within his domain. If you have a Stewart, Stuart, Starrett, of some similar name in your ancestry- you're likely descended from one of the Stuart kings of Scotland and then England. They left a lot of progeny in their wake, both legitimate and illegitimate. I'm one of those descendants, but the exact where is unverifiable.
I have to go back to 4th great-grandparents to find the first verifiable cousin marriage- or pedigree collapse- in my tree. After that, they become frequent. My direct ancestors from that point moved around- a lot. No one in my direct line going back that far has died within 50 miles of where they were born. In fact, my father was the first to die in the same state (or province or country) in which he was born. 160 miles away.
DNA states pretty conclusively one of my great-grandfathers had 6 children- besides my only child grandfather. So far, one has been identified. From someone who took the DNA test to find his biological father since his mother wouldn't tell him. His great-grandfather is my great-uncle. And was adopted when born in 1902. Identifying the other 5 would require more cooperation from the 5 DNA mystery matches- all from the same area. That cooperation has been lacking- they're not nearly as curious as the one match was. But all of them match me, and one or both or my first cousins who've tested or my niece, and one or more of the other mystery matches. And their trees go back, all of them, 4 or more generations with no common surnames. Meaning there's at least one NPE event- not parent expected.
Oh- don't rely on Familysearch- or anyone else's tree- without verifying. Anyone can change information on familysearch to what they think is correct- and they're often wrong. But if you want to know if you're related to famous people- https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/famous-relatives
Not infallible. But a good starting point. Before putting my info there I knew I was related to Johnny Depp through Effie America Palmore- my favorite name on my extended tree- who married Oren Richard Depp. I DNA match a 5th 1X removed and a 5th cousin Depp with DNA managed by Depphouse. Somewhere in that line I'm related to the 2nd President Bush through his mother. According to the site I referred to- I'm also related to the first President Bush, but far more distantly in a convoluted way. That I haven't bothered trying to verify. Famous people sites can also help you prove of disprove family lore. My family lore was we were descended from Richard Stockton who signed the Declaration of Independence. Turns out he has no known living descendants. We're descended from his cousin Richard Stockton. 2nd or 3rd, I'm not quite sure.
Ron Winkleheimer said...
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syrLyA5uD84"
That is one of my favorite episodes of Frasier. Especially when it turns out they are descended from a servant girl in the Romanov household who stole the bear, fled to New York City, and was a prostitute for many years.
@Rocco
When Frasier says, "we are descended from thieves and whores" I asked my wife, "so they are royalty!"
Aggie: "I've read too much about people that have done this and found to their dismay that their genes have been harvested for something or another in medical research. Ugh."
Uh oh - the Chinese Communists are training a clone army of John Mosbys as we speak. Only about ten more years to full maturity.
But the joke will be on them in a couple of years when they find they've cloned an army of compulsive masturbators....
JSM
My wife and I did the Ancestry Test about ten years ago. I only paid for the basics, but she pays extra for updates as they get new input and refine the analysis. (According to them; maybe it's all BS.)
Mine showed the German-British Isles genes I expected, but also some Swedish, Jewish, and Neanderthal snippets that I had little reason to expect.
My wife's showed what we expected as far as German-Swiss-British Isles from her father, but less Sicilian match than she anticipated and more from central Italy. (Also some Neanderthal but not as much as me, and a pinch of Maltese.)
Some of her nieces have gotten serious about this stuff, and one found a Scottish link, which thrilled my wife no end.
This whole obsession with trying to prove that people are "black" who have obviously lived their lives as totally non-black is weird. Isn't the key to being black today actually living the experience of being black? This reminds me of the obsession that the old time, white supremicists had with people who had "one drop" of black blood" in their ancestry being considered black. (The old "one drop" rule.)
People with my surname are scattered all over North America but their point source is one town in what is now Northern Ireland Among the Protestants there, the eldest son inherited, so all his younger siblings had to go find their fortune elsewhere. I visited there, and found the Presbyterian church yards full of the graves of my uncles who got to keep the farm.
Growing up I always heard from my grandmother that we had a horse thief in our ancestry. Great Great Granddad Ernie...horse thief. We knew this because they caught him, tried him, and wanted to hang him but he pleaded profusely that he would accept any sentence short of death and would leave Tennessee (where my family's from) permanently upon restitution.
He spent a year in prison and paid a fine before heading out West with all the other whores and horse thieves and was never heard from again. He probably became a governor or a sheriff or something.
One can't help but wonder at the wonderful windfalls witnessed when the worst head West.
Just as an aside, the author Alexander Dumas's father was known as "The Black Count", an accomplished, and recognized,General in Napoleoni's army.
Quebec has very good records. So does New England. They also started out with relatively small populations, so over time everyone was likely to be related to everyone else. It's a "bottleneck" so everyone is related to everyone else, however distantly.
Wife's father's family comes from Quebec three or four generations back. The Catholic Church kept excellent records, and genealogical research among French Canadians is easy. You're quite right about how they are all related along readily traceable lines of kinship. My wife is related to all the named celebrities in this story, including the Pope, via this Boucher progenitor and undoubtedly multiple additional lines.
There was a controversy a few years back. Many men went from France to Quebec, but fewer women did. One conclusion was that the men must have married Indian women, and that every French Canadian must be part Indian. Some are, but more likely, the men died or went back to France.
Wife's 6th great-grandmother was a native from the south bank of the St. Lawrence River near Three Rivers. Thought to be a Cree Indian. She appears on the Quebec parish records with only a Christian name of "Marie", and "sauvagesse" (i.e. female savage) instead of a surname.
For a decade beginning in 1663, nearly 800 Filles du Roi (Daughters of the King), aged 16 to 40, were sent to New France and instructed to marry—quickly.
When my wife's aunt was researching the French Canadian side of the family she came across the "Filles du Roi" and got very excited, thinking they were descended from French royal princesses. I had to explain to her that they were orphans, foundlings, unwed mothers who had shamed their families, and prostitutes and other petty criminals who were sent to populate New France as only metaphorical "Daughters of the King." Imagine sailing by yourself to the other side of the world, as a girl of 16 or so, where shortly after disembarkation the bishop would give you your choice of three or four much older backwoodsmen, marriage to be performed next Sunday so choose quickly...
"Filles du Roi" were sent to New Orleans as well, and being New Orleans a vampire legend came out of it, off course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDCzNWL7vzk
I discovered last year that my most successful ancestor was the second cousin (Grandmothers were sisters) of President Polk. They were born in Mecklenburg Co NC (outside Charlotte) nine years apart, so the Polks were already in TN (mine moved eastward). Both went to UNC, became lawyers, governors, and national officeholders, though Democrat and Whig. From what I can tell, they never served in Washington at the same time. There's still a decent chance they met, but I wonder if they knew they were cousins. Knowing the Southern Do You Know So & So? game, I suspect they probably found out.
My sister's former roommate discovered her mother's grandmother had murdered her abusive second husband and been acquitted. She asked her elderly mother about it on the phone, and her father died of a heart attack the next day. The mother was already in early dementia. The daughter became obsessed with the story and then pretty delusional and paranoid, cutting off my sister. Surprise, she was a liberal Dem, despite starting as a Repub. and having and liking Scalia as a law prof.
My only notable ancestor was Nathaniel Chapman, Massachusetts Minuteman and Continental Army soldier. He shows up historically mostly because he was John "Appleseed" Chapman's father. My Chapman grand pere was Johnny's half brother.
There's a family story that we've got Queen Mary Stuart in the bloodline but we assume that's bullshit.
Mary had illegitimate half siblings, but no full ones and her only child was James I and VI, who probably had none outside marriage.
Mom told me we were related to Martha Washington's first husband, but it must have been via a sibling's marriage, there's no Custis in the direct lines. Both of her parents had ancestors in 17th cent. Tidewater Virginia, so I'm holding out hope. I'm pretty sure both my grandmothers had direct male ancestors who were officers in the Henrico Co militia together in 1700 with Thomas Jefferson's grandfather. Families reused Christian names so often, it's hard to keep track of generations.
When I was in fourth grade, I made a bet with a black classmate that we were related. The bet was for a quarter.
I said, "You're related to Adam and Eve, right?"
He said, "Yeah."
I said, "I'm related to Adam and Eve."
And he paid up.
tcrosse@12:01, similar here, but Catholic - so there was nothing to inherit, and that my surname isn't very widespread in the US (though as with most Irish-Americans, I'll bet there are more of us here than in Ireland). But I've been to the cemetery in County Louth - we frickin' own that parish!
Once I got back more than 200 years, it was hard to see this person as different from any other person who lived back then.
Take a page from Alex Haley's book and make up interesting details yourself.
Most people can trace their ancestors back to some small village or area in South America, Europe or Africa. And the people that village intermarried with each other, and the other villages within about 5 miles. Occasionaly, some outsider (maybe a viking or foreign army) would come around but that was it.
There was a lot of racial and ethnic mixing in the New World, so South Americans can have interesting DNA results, but yes, it's different in the Old World. I had all kinds of romantic fantasies about my ancestry, but the results were depressing. If it weren't for the occasional invading army there wouldn't be any variety. I wonder if a different company would have looked at different eras and given more interesting results.
Growing up I was assured that I was descended from the great inventor Nikola Tesla. I was very excited to read his biography in high school, until I realized that he had no children. It’s tough to be descended from someone who has had no offspring.
Rocco, ref Ancestry’s percentages - thanks, that sheds some light, but I am confused. The other percentages track with my paper genealogy. For instance, I am almost 50% southern Italian, which tracks with what I know of my mom’s people, and about 10% Scottish, which fits my paternal line originating there but marrying lots of women with clearly non-Scottish surnames over the years. And there’s genes identified with both Quebec and Brittany, which makes sense as my Quebecoise grandmother’s maiden name is the toponym of a Breton town. And so on. So I made the logical non-leap that the southern African percentage also reflects actual people from there. Is my logic faulty?
JSM
@GoSpace "But if you want to know if you're related to famous people- https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/famous-relatives...."
Wow, that's fun ! 31 Presidents. 25 passengers on the Mayflower. John Wayne, Buster Keaton, Lucille Ball, Babe Ruth, Buffalo Bill, Peary, Lindbergh, Armstrong, Earhart, the Wright Brothers, Morse, Eli Whitney.... I had no idea I was so well-connected.
"Most people can trace their ancestors back to some small village or area in ... Africa. And the people that village intermarried with each other, and the other villages within about 5 miles."
Au contraire... at least in the part of East/Central Africa I lived in, you were not supposed to marry anyone from your father's clan OR your mother's clan. So marriages almost always covered a lot greater distance than you could walk in an hour.
Where we were, there are a lot of small tribes, and exogamy was the rule of the day - - among the people I knew, I can't recall a single instance where the husband and wives(s) were of the same tribe.
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