Post by BodleyFludes on Mar 7, 2021 18:06:13 GMT
If you are lucky enough to track your ancestry back and back through available records, into the mists of time, there will probably come a point where an ancestral line intersects with a noble family, and you have reached your happy land. Noble families have established trees, a great many available on the Internet, and they intermarry with other noble families. Obviously not exclusively though, because one of them married an ancestor of mine. But the way the direct ancestor count spirals upwards as you go back, it might be thought inevitable, sooner or later. My ancestor who married the daughter of a noble (smarmy bugger) I claim decent from through four separate and distinct lines. The multiple duty ancestor is bound to pop up somewhere down the line. Because, for interest, the available pool of possible ancestors narrows with the descent into the past. Far fewer people around then, than now. For instance, the less than half a billion population of Earth at around 450AD, indicates a multiple-duty ancestry for us back there, because the theoretical ancestor count (2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, etc.,) way back in 450 AD, would be more like two and a quarter quadrillion. Many times the population of Earth then.
What that also means is that, having gathered a huge family tree, it becomes reasonable to pick a worthy individual at random, inspect his/her ancestry, along all its many branches, and somewhere down the line find an individual already included in your own tree, to make a link. Not always successful, but sometimes. Not a typical genealogical pursuit either, but an interesting exercise. Anyway, as the tree expands over time (I began around 1960, and have been at it off and on ever since), following ever more slender branches ever outwards, so long as the information comes easily to hand, one finds plenty of notables and historical characters scooped up in the net, far removed from me of course, but there, firmly placed on some branch of the tree.
What that also means is that, having gathered a huge family tree, it becomes reasonable to pick a worthy individual at random, inspect his/her ancestry, along all its many branches, and somewhere down the line find an individual already included in your own tree, to make a link. Not always successful, but sometimes. Not a typical genealogical pursuit either, but an interesting exercise. Anyway, as the tree expands over time (I began around 1960, and have been at it off and on ever since), following ever more slender branches ever outwards, so long as the information comes easily to hand, one finds plenty of notables and historical characters scooped up in the net, far removed from me of course, but there, firmly placed on some branch of the tree.