It’s peasants all the way down.
I did hit Stewarts in Scotland on my partner’s tree, but haven’t connected them to * the* Stewarts.
By the way, shouldn’t the Charlamagne descendents have a reunion? There’s enough of us that for five dollars each we could rent Vegas for a week.
I agree, we are related through Marie Cote. very distant.
I’m not sure Vegas would have a sufficient water supply.
Charlemagne apparently has some descendants in surprisingly far away places.
I’ve waited some time to ask because I didn’t want to appear stupid, but I don’t follow you.
I checked the link on pedigree collapse and to quote,
It would seem to me that where ever pedigree collapse occurs, the probability of descent from someone in the subset of prominent historical figures is reduced.
Are you sure you didn’t mean “in spite of pedigree collapse…” rather than “because of pedigree collapse” ?
I am descended from these people:
and these:
No, it is increased. Because, weird outliers aside, any line that successfully propagates itself soon ramifies throughout a much larger population. The universe of prominent people is sufficiently large that if a trace back far enough you’re eventually going to run into one, if it has lasted into the modern day at all.
I’ll quote septimus above:
Pedigree collapse results in the phenomenom that the farther back you go the more likely everybody around you today is descended from the same group of people, because at a certain point you start getting fewer and fewer unique ancestors. Eventually we all start converging back to the same starting line ( ultimately a genetic Adam & Eve ). Which means if you were a particular 8th century royal whose line actually successfully propagated itself into modern times, you should literally have millions of descendants. And those millions breeding with other millions result in even more millions ;). The longer a particular line lasts, on average the bigger it should get ( again, weird outliers aside ).
John Adam Kasson was, in the later 19th century, a well known political figure in the US. He was Postmaster General, ambassador to Austria-Hungary, and so on. He was my third-cousin five times removed.
Our only common ancestor was one Adam Kasson, who came to Conneticut in 1722. He had a lot of kids, I’m descended from one, JAK from another. My maternal grandmother was a Kasson.
Wallis (Warfield) Simpson is a cousin on my maternal grandmother’s side.
They do; we all do.
From wikipedia:
Tracing one person’s lineage back in time forms a binary tree of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on. However, the number of individuals in such an ancestor tree grows exponentially and will eventually become impossibly high. For example, an individual human alive today would, over 30 generations, going back to about the High Middle Ages, have 2^30 or about 1.07 billion ancestors, more than the total world population at the time.
Of course, you don’t need to think this hard about it to realize that it’s inevitable.
Anybody ever heard of Bob Suffridge? He played at UT, then the Philidelphia Eagles, 1938 thru 1940. And Roy Acuff was my father’s cousin.
Hey, we’re from the hills…we’ve got our “royalty” too. lol
Ha! I didnt even think about that.
I dont know if he did or not. My Uncle that lived in Monmouth Ill. is the one that told me about the family history when I was around 7 or 8 years old. He had the bed in which he was born and a bunch of his personal possessions, including a couple of his guns. He told me that I was a cousin, but cant remember the line. I probably should do a little digging.