The Relative Importance of Geneological Lines
A great, great, great, great grandmother of one of my friends arrived on the Mayflower. Another friend boasts he is distantly related to John Adams, and yet another claims to be a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson (but who isn't?).
Pedigree. It seems like we all want to be show dogs.
Ok, call it sour grapes because I have no ancestral bragging rights of my own, although family history has it that my grandfather (to the 1,000th power) was one of the first paramecium to attempt to undergo mitosis. (He failed, and spent the rest of his days utterly alone.) The fact of the matter is, going back a mere ten generations in my family tree introduces me to 512 individual family lines, and by tracing my lineage back just 20 more generations (to 1100AD), I discover my genealogical lines had branched out to include 300 million direct descendants in a world populated at that time by… well, 300 million people. That makes me rather well connected after all, not to mention all the holiday cards I'll be writing this year.
Author Guy Murchie observed, "… no human being (of any race) can be less closely related to any other human than approximately 50th cousin, and most of us, no matter what color, are a lot closer." What's the significance of this? It means that Jewish and Palestinian blood intermingle in the tissues of every person living today in the Middle East, and African blood flows through the veins of even the "purest" members of the Ku Klux Klan (and, the fact that we are 60th cousins to the jackass explains their behavior).
So even if tracing my ancestors back to the Massachusetts Bay clam won't earn me respect from the descendants of the Mayflower, I am the stuff of Kings and Queens, as well as vagabonds and thieves. My ancestors fought for justice, and against it. They prayed, and they pillaged. They built the gas chambers, and were marched into them.
Our arms are only long enough to embrace immediate family and friends, but our hearts and minds have infinite reach. It would be good to look beneath the veneer of genealogical lines to realize that we are, in fact, one family. But if you are bent on exploring your family roots, I suggest you go back far enough in time to when they actually had dirt on them.
Pedigree. It seems like we all want to be show dogs.
Ok, call it sour grapes because I have no ancestral bragging rights of my own, although family history has it that my grandfather (to the 1,000th power) was one of the first paramecium to attempt to undergo mitosis. (He failed, and spent the rest of his days utterly alone.) The fact of the matter is, going back a mere ten generations in my family tree introduces me to 512 individual family lines, and by tracing my lineage back just 20 more generations (to 1100AD), I discover my genealogical lines had branched out to include 300 million direct descendants in a world populated at that time by… well, 300 million people. That makes me rather well connected after all, not to mention all the holiday cards I'll be writing this year.
Author Guy Murchie observed, "… no human being (of any race) can be less closely related to any other human than approximately 50th cousin, and most of us, no matter what color, are a lot closer." What's the significance of this? It means that Jewish and Palestinian blood intermingle in the tissues of every person living today in the Middle East, and African blood flows through the veins of even the "purest" members of the Ku Klux Klan (and, the fact that we are 60th cousins to the jackass explains their behavior).
So even if tracing my ancestors back to the Massachusetts Bay clam won't earn me respect from the descendants of the Mayflower, I am the stuff of Kings and Queens, as well as vagabonds and thieves. My ancestors fought for justice, and against it. They prayed, and they pillaged. They built the gas chambers, and were marched into them.
Our arms are only long enough to embrace immediate family and friends, but our hearts and minds have infinite reach. It would be good to look beneath the veneer of genealogical lines to realize that we are, in fact, one family. But if you are bent on exploring your family roots, I suggest you go back far enough in time to when they actually had dirt on them.
posted by Jeffrey Reel at
3:50 PM
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