Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Friday, December 29. 2023

How many ancestors?


200 or so years ago is about 8 generations, which means around 250 ancestors alive at that time, and 500+ cumulatively over those years.


For most people, though, that math likely overestimates because due to rural and small towns, social class, religion, castes, etc., there was more inbreeding than the math reflects. Cousins of various sorts,, etc.


I do have the names, approximate addresses (towns), and burial sites of almost all of my ancestors back to around 1600 and some to the mid-1500s. After that, even church records have deteriorated. A DNA check is fun to go way back. I know mine.


Maybe a smart reader can take on this topic. 








Posted by Bird Dog in The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 13:32 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)

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MAD magazine had a population implosion cover, an inverted triangle with YOU at the bottom and more and more ancestors as you went up.
#1 rhhardin on 2023-12-29 13:53 (Reply)
Basically correct.

Until you get back to Eve.
#1.1 Bird Dog on 2023-12-29 13:55 (Reply)
I think you've confused Eve with that Immaculate Conception gal.
#1.1.1 Mike Anderson (Link) on 2023-12-29 14:42 (Reply)
I traced my genealogy back to the 1600s, too. I quit when I finally realized that nobody cares.
#2 snopercod on 2023-12-29 16:41 (Reply)
I have a post entitled "Pedigree Collapse" that addresses this at my Assistant Village Idiot site. The spam filter rejects my link, but you can just enter "pedigree" in my search bar.

Whether I'm a smart person or not you can judge for yourself. As for ancestry tracing, I used to get excited by nobility from the 1400s until I realised that
A) records got less reliable, especially in Europe. The French Canadians priests did a magnificent job of record-keeping, however.
B) the "father of record" was less likely to be the genetic father (with each generation we are taking the word of one more set of women, so that even among groups like the Puritans with very low "nonpaternity events" it adds up over time
C) the numbers of ancestors start exceeding the number of humans in the territory.

The DNA confirms what I approximately knew, with mild surprises. Therefore I now only trace back to the immigrant ancestor, whatever country they were from. That will have to be close enough.
#3 Assistant Village Idiot on 2023-12-29 18:29 (Reply)
One of my sisters handles all the genealogy for my mother’s side of the family. My maternal ancestors managed to keep and collect a pretty solid set of records tracing back from our arrival in East Tennessee in the mid-1700s, to our departure from Ulster about 50 years earlier. My sister managed to trace it back a couple of centuries further to the Scottish Borders. The big surprise came when she started tracing my father’s ancestors. It turns out that, not only did they follow the same migration pattern from Scotland to Ulster to Tennessee, but that they lived in the same settlements, or settlements nearby and almost certainty would have known each other.
#4 Chadd Newman on 2023-12-29 19:09 (Reply)
In one of his "Day the Universe Changed" episodes, James Burke looked at the THREE ways that James Watt changed history.

The first, the steam engine, is obvious.

The second is less obvious, if perhaps more long lasting. Passenger rail traffic, and steamships, made it possible for a man from one village to meet and marry a woman from a different village. Why did England, and then America, boom so quickly? Hybrid vigor works for humans as well as it does for livestock, and reducing rural inbreeding is a good thing. Especially when a man from one European nation can come to America and meet a woman from a completely different nation - like my Greek grandfather marrying my Irish grandmother, in Ohio.

The third development was the invention of carbon paper, made with carbon from the soot of steam engines. Yes, James Watt is responsible for the development of the bureaucracy.
#5 Ken Mitchell on 2023-12-30 21:12 (Reply)

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