Actually, I had forgotten. . . I went to school with quite a number for fourth cousins, but I only found out we were related in the past few years.
Is that a literal thing, or is it more one of those statistical calculations?
I mean, I’m having a hard time imagining how a guy whose family has lived down in Spain near Gibraltar for generations is descended from a nameless Finnish reindeer herder in the far north of Finland who had a child in 995. Or for that matter, how a guy whose family is Faroese descends from a Greek who had a child on the Laconian peninsula in 885.
I have maybe 4 or 5 cousins, but I haven’t seen any in over 20 years. I suspect some might have kids. I never did see much value in family.
Descent from Charlemagne is often quite easy to establish.
Lincoln OTOH is something else entirely. His provable blood line has died out. No one alive today is likely to be able to prove descent from him.
OTOH, there are people who are sloppy about terminology and include as “ancestors” people who are related to actual ancestors. Fie.
There’s a ton of people out there who once they find a link to Charlemagne grab one of those stupid ancestor charts for him that gives a lineage to ancient times, then to prominent Hebrews, then back to Adam and Eve. Lots of questionable stuff all over the place there. Another Fie.
<<sudden cognitive dissonance caused by poster name/statement incongruity…
Calm down, I never had a problem with my old man. Even when he was being a racist he’d tell me it was wrong. But all the rest are pretty much useless.
I like studying the family tree because it can give insights into history, makes some of the things I learned in school come alive. And I used the name of the ancestor from the OP in a Finish the western story, many years ago.
My mother’s family was really big into genealogy as well.
On my maternal side, going back about seven generations, the gr- gr- whatever grandmother was a lady of the court in a Scandinavian counties, and became pregnant.
She claimed it was the king, which is a good thing to tell your parents, I suppose. No proof of course.
European royalty was all connected so we may be related as well.
My father used to boil over whenever anyone would mention that. “But he was a bastard child!”
That Charlemagne is ancestral to every living European is easy to understand and believe. But some of the claims would be more credible if they came with fudging (“There is a 99% chance that 99.99% of living humans …”) The claims are derived from models, but the models don’t deal with extreme isolation, like the Sentinelese or the Pintupi of Australia.
This claim seems to derive from this paper, which uses DNA study. I’ll print the paper and try to read it. (Nitpick: By ‘offspring’ you mean ‘descendants alive today.’)
This is closely related to the Identical Ancestor Point which has been estimated, for all humans alive today, at 5,000 to 15,0000 years ago. (Wiki mentions, without a number, restricting the point to Europeans.)
ETA: Here’s another interesting question I don’t know the answer to. Pick two living Americans at random. What will be the typical closest relationship between them? I’ll guess 12th cousin, or thereabouts.
I just did an Ancestry DNA test, which revealed a lot of 3rd and 4th cousins. My mom grew up in Camden, NJ, and she said there were 200 people with her maiden last name there. I always thought she was exaggerating until the 1940 Census became available and I looked! She wasn’t kidding. She says she grew up with her cousins being like her sisters, and has always been sad that we moved to the Midwest when I was 2 and didn’t have the same experience.
On Dad’s side, I was never as close with my cousins, but some years back a third cousin on that side found me while doing genealogical research on Jewishgen.org (she’s a professional genealogist and was at that time developing a genealogy company, which she has since sold off). I knew within minutes of speaking to her that we were actually related. And she spurred me to finally write away to the National Archives for my great-grandmother’s file, which is when I discovered that not only had she spent time in mental hospitals, which I had discovered in earlier research myself, but she had possibly lived in the United States illegally from the 1920s until her death in the 1970s.
I’ve never been able to determine my paternal grandmother’s immigration status either; she was born in Canada, but she was white and spoke English and she and my grandfather ran a business together their whole careers, so there wasn’t much occasion for anyone to check. But after 9/11, she couldn’t renew her driver’s license anymore. FOIA requests have turned up nothing, and I believe my aunt even had her Congressperson’s office investigate. So she lived in the U.S. from 1930 until her death in 2006, possibly illegally.
(I started looking into it when my grandfather died - he had been bedridden for years, and now that she didn’t have to take care of him, my grandmother’s sister wanted to take her to London, which she had always dreamed of doing. So I got a call from my stepmother asking how we could get Nana a passport. There’s more to the story - she grew up in an orphanage because of her mother’s mental health and her father’s abandonment, and her name on her birth certificate doesn’t have a clear relationship to the name she used her entire adult life, so it would have been a documentation nightmare even to get her a Canadian passport. But I never found a way to prove that she was eligible for an American one.)
I tell that story to clients a lot - out of all the people who say their ancestors immigrated legally, how many of them actually know for sure?
Eva Luna, Immigration Paralegal
P.S. My third cousin the genealogist turned out to be a really cool person and I hang out wither her pretty much whenever we are in the same city. She is much more religiously observant than I am (which doesn’t take much - I basically show up for holidays and life cycle celebrations), but she partakes in a long tradition of Jewish progressive activism that I can certainly get behind.
I went to school with a few (does math … ) third cousins, two of whom were siblings and one of whom was the siblings’ first cousin. We learned of our relationship while we were in high school. It disappointed me greatly as one of them was smokin’ hot.
These folks remain the most distant living relatives I am aware of. I have not really done any genealogy in that direction, I’ve only looked at my own ancestors. It does occur to me, of course, that if I were to visit certain towns and encounter certain surnames, that I would almost certainly be dealing with distant relations.
I’m holding out until they have it at Windsor Castle.
I’m able to get a direct link back to Charlemagne because I discovered a few prominent colonial ancestors. Their lines were pretty well mapped out to where I could document English royalty eventually up to Longshanks. From there it’s easy to map back further.
The funny thing is I would never consider myself English at all. One narrow branch of my family goes to England. The rest of the tree is filled with Italian, Irish and Polish peasants.
Lincoln’s direct family did die out. He only had one child who lived long enough to have a family. The last descendant of Robert died in the 80s. There are a bunch of us cousins. Lincoln’s 3x great grandfather is my 7x great grandfather.
I deer hunt land that is owned by the g-granddaughter of my g-grandpa’s cousin. My children know her children a little (they’ve met.) I never can remember how to count the cousin thing. Back in the day I knew some of my grandmother’s nieces and nephews well enough to talk to them at the mall. Now, not so much because it’s been a long time.
I corresponded by email for awhile with a distant cousin in Finland. I’m pretty sure I’m probably related to everyone that is descended from someone in the area from which we shared an ancestor.
You are her 4th cousin, so your children are fifth cousins of her children.
Has your family been connected to the same land for many generations?
G’-pa’s g-g-pa cleared the land for his sawmill. My g-pa lived and helped on the subsequent farm before the Depression after he was kicked out by his parents as a teen. He would help his bachelor cousin now and then over most of his life. When the cousin passed away, the land was willed to the parents of the current owner and she and her hubbie bought the house and buildings from her dad. My grandpa was given hunting rights by his g-grandpa. All owners honored it. My grandfather passed it on to us and the current owners honor it. It helps that skilled trades run in my immediate family and we’ve been helping restore the huge old farm house over the past two decades. My last name had been on the deed (and in the brick of the house) for 130 years until about 3 years ago when the current owners moved in.
I’ve met second cousins on my mother’s side and some of their children at family funerals and/or first communions,
second cousins on my mother’s side (and their mother, my dad’s cousin) after one of the second-cousins used her honeymoon to come back to the ancestral homeland and meet the distant relatives (her husband’s family was from the next province over; his grandparents and my grandmother lived about 1h away from each other),
a first-cousin of my maternal grandmother (we shared a taxi ride by happenstance during a bus strike, their last name is so unique that when she introduced herself I exclaimed “oh, you must be my grandmother’s cousin! She’s one of your uncle Carlos’ daughters” and yep), we didn’t meet again or share contact info and she’s probably dead by now but that was cool,
had for years a classmate whose father and my grandmother were first-cousins and spent several summers together at his house (my “uncle” now has three kids I’ve also met; his wife was our school class’ Queen Bee and now owns a pharmacy about 50m from my mother’s house); an aunt of his (cousin to my grandmother) and I were coworkers for several years and still “grab a basket*” when we happen to meet,
at one job, there was a person with a very peculiar last name. At one point we had a telegraphic conversation which prompted one of my coworkers to tell another “I have a feeling I got here halfway through the movie” “me too, and I suspect we’ll never be told the beginning”. His great-grandparents were the cousins of my great-grandmother’s who took her and her two little children in after she became a widow.
My lastname has the form “Commonlastname de Place”. I once got an email from a coworker who thought Commonlastname was my lastname and Place was from my nonexistent husband: she started by making fun of my using Mr. Nonexistent’s lastname and then told me that he and her husband must be related, as his lastname was Place. I explained that the husband and I could in fact be related and that his foreparents had discarded the first pieces at some point; it was also possible that his family and mine simply hailed from the same place. She never wrote back.
One advantage of unusual last names is that they make your relatives instantly recognizable even if you’d never heard of each other.
- agarrar un capazo, “to grab a basket”: dialectal (Ribera de Navarra) Spanish for having a long conversation in the street with someone you just happened to run into. The longest capazo I’ve grabbed was 3h with a former classmate, standing in snow up to our knees.
I recently connected with a fourth cousin and her grandkids (they’d be my 6th cousins?)