Families

[Rhiannon]

I’m always fascinated by genealogy, families and the missing pieces that can help us understand. I’ve researched my family tree on my mother’s side and found some interesting stuff, and I enjoy reading stories about families finding missing members.

So I was interested to see this today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-43538007

And then I read the last two paragraphs, which I find devastating.

One thing I’ve learned from genealogy is that it can inform patterns in the present. In both my grandfather and grandmother’s families there’s a huge narrative of loss, including children dying in infancy, and I think that informed my mother’s parenting and the secretive way in which death was talked about in my family.

[Robbie]

That's a very, very touching report. It's so good that Antony found his brothers and will now meet other family members at last. Despite his dad walking out on him and his mother he is amazingly successful.

[Harrowby Hall]

I can't say I have much interest in genealogy. Although it would be interesting to know if the Minstrel Blondel was really an ancestor of mine as my father and his family believed was the case. If that is so, his musical ability bypassed me, but was inherited by my father, sisters and daughters.

It is quite likely, LR, and possibly for Robbie too!

You had two parents. They each had two parents. And your grandparents had two parents each as well. And for each generation before that each individual had two parents.

Blondel lived c.1180 - 800+ years ago. Say there were three generations each century - that would be about 25 generations. The number of anticedents that you have then will be  2 raised to the power of 25. 2 multiplied by itself 25 times.

Do the sums and you will find that you had over 33 million ancestors in the 12th century. No reason why Blondel shouldn't be one of them!

Of course, you could have a single ancestor occurring in two or more family lines, so it could be smaller than 33 million.

Another complication is the repeated visitation of the Black Death in the Middle Ages. It was possible that the nobility - having better living conditions than the serfs - had a better survival rate with the consequence that just about all of us has a royal ancestor or two.

I had a friend who claimed ancestry from Charlemagne. He even had a chart showing this ancestral progression. But the only real difference between him and the rest of us is that he had a chart ...