You know one of my hobbies is genealogy. And you’ve heard the 6 Degrees of Separation theory. Well, I have one for you.
You are one. Your parents are 2. Your grandparents are 4 in number. Your great-grandparents are 8. You have 16 great-great (or 2nd-great) grandparents. You have 32 third-great-grandparents. And 64 fourth-great grandparents.
Certain observations follow from this. First, it’d be hard to get you and all your relatives into the same room.
Second, if you’ve ever thought about trying to do a genealogy, it’s a pretty broad target. Your chances of being related to somebody who left records is fairly high.
The tenth-greats carry you into the 1600’s. And it’s sometimes possible to find connections all the way back to the 30th-greats. When you reach the 34th-greats, your number of active grandparents of that generation exceeds the current population of Earth.
Somewhere back there, there’s got to be some duplication, eh? So we’re sharing people.
By the time you reach the 70th generation, you’ve hit the BC/AD divide. And the number of grandparents you have by the 70th generation…I haven’t calculated. But it’s got to be considerable. You’re probably related not only to the whole Roman Empire, but to the whole planet, in one degree or another, especially since the world population was considerably smaller then.
Good morning, world. 🙂
Kind of makes you know how much it’s taken the world to produce you, doesn’t it?
Mostly English with a soupcon of French.
It was recently discovered that Henry Louis Gates (professor of African-American studies at Harvard) who was arrested for being rude to a police officer in his own home) and his arresting officer James Crowley are both descendants of the 4th century Irish High King Niall. The same is true for just about every O’Neill, I think. And 100% of the crew of Dublin Again.
I’m Welch-Irish-English and Italian-Swiss. My dad used to tell me that we had indian blood because of Grandma Lightfoot. The more we dug, we found out that the Lightfoots were originally from England.
I also found out that the second to the last of the Appiano’s who ruled Pisa was a cruel Caligula type guy who was poisoned by his own family. His mother then stuck his brother (well behaved, this one) onto the throne. Couldn’t find out anymore after that…
Well as every living creature is descended from one cell it’s hardly surprising. And next time you kill a cold you might just be killing your 2^n sibling 🙂
I think I’m gonna cancel my Terminix visit….
There are also cultural aspects of relationships. A recent sociological survey showed that 50% of Iraqis marry people who are first or second cousins. This is common in the Middle East.
There’s also the Genghis Khan factor. Something like one Asian out of eight is descended from Genghis Khan. Guy got around. It was often the case that warlords would mark their territory, so to speak. (Cf. the excellent Charlton Heston movie “The War Lord”.)
I’m half-Irish. The mid-19th-century mad scramble mass migration makes it hard for some of us to do genealogy; apparently every ship that cross the ocean in 1850 had at least one Michael Patrick Farrell whose parents were named John and Mary. Also makes it hard when one’s ancestors lie about their ancestry. My great-grandmother claimed for years and years to be the same age as my great-grandfather. When the 1900 census was released, my mother discovered hmm, not quite true. (My great-aunt recalled a loud argument on this subject in the late 1930s, and she was very highly amused to learn the truth.)
I did a roots tour a few years ago, visiting the very small towns in southwestern Iowa where my father’s ancestors came from. Found a place where all the locals looked kind of like each other. The creepy part of this was that I looked like a local there, in a way that my Hawaiian and Jewish travelling companions extremely did not.
With people signing up to match themselves as organ donors and with DNA and database technology expanding and improving, it may become possible to map out very large sections of the entire human family tree within our lifetimes. Given what has already happened among the descendants of, I believe, George Washington, one anticipates much controversy. 😉
My parents did a smidgen of tracing and found someone maybe three generations back who might have been their common ancestor. I figure that’s why I look so much alike;.
Lol!
Two interesting things about humans and relationships: As has been shown in multiple cases, kids who are raised together tend to not want to get married to each other, even if they aren’t related. On the other hand, people who are related genetically but first meet as adults often find that they are sexually attracted, and don’t think of each other as relatives. Which makes a certain amount of genetic sense… if your genes want to perpetuate themselves, who better to do it with than someone who has some of them?
So… in something like the Alliance/Union universe, where kids can be somewhat randomly sired, it seems like you run a higher chance of half-siblings meeting as adults and falling for each other. Especially if the station decides to raise their kids communally, thus decreasing the desire to marry there. Has anyone considered this in stories?
Say it has been a possibility: that’s one reason youngers go out for their (ahem) maiden venture onto dockside in the company of way too many elder cousins, who will try to make sure they understand what crews are most acceptable and what ones aren’t, and also suspected kinships.
Tomorrow’s Sunday
By Harry R. Erwin, PhD
(November 2005)
Mary has been venerated as the Mother of Jesus for centuries, but there is a real sense she is the Mother of us all. To see how this might be, we will examine what we know about the family of Jesus.
In Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, his family is introduced in chapter 3, where his mother and brothers, believing he is out of his mind, come to get him. His response is preserved in a number of sources including the Gospel of Thomas, a very early collection of Christian sayings, where Jesus says “Those here who do what my Father wants are my brothers and my mother.” (trans Funk, R. W., R. W. Hoover, et al. (1993). The Five Gospels. New York, HarperCollins.) Later in Mark 6, Jesus is identified by the natives of Nazareth as the son of Mary, the brother of James and Judas and Simon and more than one unnamed sister. Matthew adds Joseph to the list of brothers here. The other appearance of family members in the core gospel narrative is the presence of his mother in John 19:26-27, which probably reflects John’s special interests rather than history.
In Acts and Paul, we see the emergence of James the Just, the brother of Jesus, as a leader of the Jerusalem community after the first Easter. According to Paul, he was one of those who received a vision of the Risen Christ. He also appears in Josephus as brother of Jesus and leader of the Christian community when stoned to death at the initiative of the high priest Ananus in 62 AD. (That incident led to the deposition of Ananus by King Agrippa.)
Descendents of Mary and Joseph, termed Desposyni, were the usual rulers of Ebionite churches during the first half millennium of the Christian Era. Hegesippus also reports that grandsons of Judas (the brother of Jesus) were interviewed and released by the emperor Domitian and lived into the reign of Trajan. Other known relatives included Simeon, the second bishop of Jerusalem, a son of Clopas, and three Nestorian bishops of the third century.
Whether or not these reports were accurate, Mary had many, many descendents. In the first generation, she had at least seven; in the second probably fourteen; by 300 AD, perhaps four hundred; by 1000 AD, possibly the entire population of Asia, Africa, and Europe. The date in the past at which everyone living is either the ancestor of nobody or everybody alive today is remarkably recent. That date for Europe, Asia, and Africa is some time before 700 AD (600 BC at the earliest), and for the world, it is about 1000 BC, reflecting isolated populations in Australia and the Americas. So, most of us are probably descended from Mary—she might be called the Mother of us all.
How does it feel to be a member of the extended family of Jesus? How does it feel to look at foreign faces—faces of colour—and realize they are likely to be members of that same extended family?
Very touching 🙂 As a Catholic, this means a lot to me. Thank you for those thoughts 🙂
Begging everyone’s pardon, but just to make things clear: for Catholics, we’re committed to the statement that the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose birthday we celebrated yesterday, was perpetually virgin and therefore had no other physical children than Jesus, by St. Joseph or anyone else. (We hold that the “brothers” are to be understood as cousins or, possibly, children of Joseph by an earlier marriage.)
The reason is not far to seek: the Father of her one Son was, and is, still around.
As an independent argument for this position, Jesus, on the cross, commended Mary and John son of Zebedee to each other as mother and son, which he would not be free to do if she had had other children who would have had the right and duty to see to her care. (In her Son, we hold, all Christians are her children and our brothers.)
Not meaning to give offense, and hoping none has been taken.
It certainly makes hating another human being solely on the grounds of his ‘difference’ a stupid sort of family feud.
all i want to do is find my irish great great grandparents info! sheesh! and seeing if we have any living relative in germany on the other side….
ahhh the joys of incomplete/sorta accurate records ;P
Back in 1982, when there was some publicity given to President Reagan’s descent from the Irish high king Brian Boru (†A.D. 1014), a friend of mine did a back-of-the-envelope calculations and determined that everyone is descended from Brian Boru. Good enough for me.
Hmm, I think I’m actually descended from one of his neighbors.