THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, December 3, 1994 TAG: 9412020010
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
Climbing family trees is a booming activity these days.
It's a marvelous pastime even when the predecessors you discover have no provable connection with Mary Queen of Scots. And even when the evidence suggests some research target was less than a paragon. Maybe not a horse thief, as the joke goes, but perhaps more rogue than solid citizen.
Something entirely aside from such specific results, however, has also made the game an absorbing one to me, as one of its more inexpert, sporadic, but enthusiastic players.
I'm thinking about the sheer numbers involved - and various implications of the ancestral arithmetic.
For starters: Each of us has two parents.
Each of those had two and so on back through the years. Which means we each had four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents and so on.
Well, even if you do the multiplication conservatively, counting three generations to each century (the standard span my dictionary uses for one generation is 30 years) and rounding off the enlarging figures to the safe side, in short order you come up with mind-numbing totals.
It would appear that a single pres-ent-day individual could claim direct descent from more than 2,000 individuals who lived in 1594, more than 1 million in 1294, a total approaching 70 million about the time of the Battle of Hastings (1066), and more than 34 billion in 794! That last is more than five times the swollen, present-day population (6 billion) of the entire planet.
And the multiplication reaches truly astronomical dimensions if we take it on back through the earlier thousands of years of recorded history, say to ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, not to mention the Stone Age, with its Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal generations upon gen-er-a-tions.
The mischievous temptation is to argue from all this (even if the mathematical progression is adjusted in some substantial way) that each person of today may have a direct blood line going back to every person who lived beyond a certain date in history and who produced a continuing line of offspring. That is, we must all be descended from just about everybody back then.
Any one of those fellows who helped erect those great pillars at Stonehenge, and whose line was not cut off in some way, must be my ancestor. Same goes with whole ranks of Roman legionnaires, with many a worker on the Pyramids, and - indeed - with a whole passel of pharaohs!
I guess that precision genealogy, with its tighter grip on reality, doesn't offer fringe benefits like that.
I'm glad my kind does. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.
by CNB