Relatively Speaking Blog

At this time of year, I remember my parents with gratitude for the many things they did for me.  I also reflect on the generations before them and the efforts they made that have enabled me to be here today.  I appreciate the stories I’ve heard about my grandparents, great grandparents, and a few generations that go a little further back.  I also have gathered names of ancestor’s whose stories I am still trying to discover; and then there are the many more unfilled names on the family tree waiting to be found, which would be an unachievable task to fill them all.

When looking at a pedigree chart, it is easy to see how each preceding generation doubles the number of forebears.  To trace 6 generations and locate all of one’s 4^th great grandparents, that search would involve seeking 32 sets of 4^th great grandparents.  But first, one would have to know his parents, grandparents, as well as the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd great grandparents, for an additional 62 people, or a total of 126 ancestors.   If this person were about 65 years old, and a generation spanned about 30 years, many of these 4^th great grandparents would have been born sometime between the French and Indian War and the start of the Revolutionary War when the population of the American colonies reached 2.2 million.

About 1620, when the Puritans crossed the ocean to settle a new colony in Massachusetts, would be the approximate period when his 9^th great grandparents, all 2,048 of them, were brought into this world.  Traveling back to find the 18^th great grandparents around the 1350s when the Bubonic Plague was devastating Europe, he would be locating over 1 million of them.  Jumping back another 9 generations to Medieval Europe when wars were waged between emerging nations, like the Norman Conquest in 1066, his 27^th great grandparents were arriving in the world to total over 500 million—more than the entire world population of that time.  In only another 120 years, the generation of 31^st great grandparents outnumber today’s world population by over 1.2 billion!  One could continue calculating the infinite numbers of ancestors, but it would be an impossible feat to find the trillions of names on the family tree.

While I know some of the struggles and successes of my ancestors from the past 200 years, I can only imagine what the yet uncovered ancestors might have endured.  Some may have had the good fortune to experience wealth or a comfortable life.  More of these antecedents probably struggled through famine, wars, pestilence and may have even succumbed to those fates early in their life.  Others ventured from home, braving new frontiers and working to create a better life for themselves and their families.  The quantity of ancestors that we have is amazing, but more humbling to me, is the knowledge that we only exist because each and every one of this endless quantity of predecessors survived whatever ordeals they encountered, found a mate, and produced another generation of children who did the same, from the dawn of man to our parents.  That is something for which to be truly grateful.  Happy Thanksgiving.