Featured Thought I would Share a few Antique Books From my Mini LibraryI Love

My German grandfather worked on ships when he was young. He is in the Ellis Island database several times as a crew member. But when he came into the U.S. I believe he came through Galveston... so, no help from the Ellis Island database for me!

 

Then there's always the Descendants of the Illegitimate Sons and Daughters of the Kings of Britain, known to many as the "Royal Bastards.

Simple mathematics would indicate that pretty well anybody would qualify for that one, otherwise there would simply not be enough ancestors to go round.
15 generations gives everyone 32,000 ancestors. A million people would need 32 thousand million ancestors, and in 1700 the British population was about 6 million.

So of the roughly 50 million native born British nowadays, you'd need 1800 thousand million ancestors in 1700. Since there were only 6 million people, at that distance in time we are all related about 3,000,000 times. That gives you a 50% chance of 'Royal Blood'. Go back another hundred years or two and the figures for shared ancesters eventually exceed the number of atoms in the Earth, let alone the population, and Kings have been throwing off bastards since there were kings.

 

Af, what about my supposed line back to Oliver Cromwell. Is it likely he had a disproportionately large number of descendents, too?

Fig, I lived in Galveston for a year, and loved that people from many cultural backgrounds ended up living there since it was the "Ellis Island of the West."

 

Is there a Vito Corleone in that Ellis Island database?

 

Af, what about my supposed line back to Oliver Cromwell. Is it likely he had a disproportionately large number of descendents, too?

All family trees are based on the idea that the father is a known entity. Women the world over know this isn't always the case. Sometimes genetic analysis will support a theoretical descent as statistically possible, but over ten generations the chances of there being no fathers that do not make any contribution except in name become more than even.

A matrilineal only chart must by the nature of things be more accurate, but your general family tree is pretty sure to have a few grafts on the branches.

The only real qualification for many of these ancestral things is having enough money and time to do the research, which is a pretty good way of ensuring that the membership does not include any riff-raff.

 

Current research indicates that today’s world population traces back to only a handful of progenitors. The research is based on the study of Mitochondrial DNA, which passes down only through the maternal line. Everybody traces back to a couple of dozen mothers in the Stone Age.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Daughters_of_Eve

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_DNA_haplogroup

 

The matrilineal tree is generally much more difficult to compile, depending on which types of records are available. This is due to the fact that almost all women changed their surname when marrying, and finding the maiden surname can be tricky. It's true about the father/known entity issue, too. I have a friend who through DNA analysis learned that a few generations back a patrilineal ancestor could not have been the person who had always been assumed to be the ancestor. I'm sure that with more DNA analysis out there that more of these sorts of cases will be found.

 

It's a fascinating subject. I wish I had the time to delve into it more, both personally and as a field.

 

Lots of skeletons in the cupboards!

 

Gary Roberts of the New England Genealogical society told a group I was in years ago that there were 500 colonial American families descended from, I believe, Edward the 1st of England. Then he noted that 15% of the population of the US today is descended from those 500 families. When you add in descendents of other English royal lines, that means there are likely more people in the US today descended from English royalty than there are people in England.

Hardly an exclusive group - but tying into one or more of these lines makes the research go that much faster, since these lines have been done.