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Life
The significance or insignificance of life presented itself today. Many of you may know www.familysearch.org is a new web site which enables one to find those lost family members through the miracle of the internet. So, I thought I would use this new tool to dig for a few more lost ancesters to add to the growing family tree. Well, I struck the mother lode yesterday.In the last 10 years the growing internet has enabled distant segments of families to pool information and solve some of the puzzles which once had taken years of digging through the stacks to solve. Thanks to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints the time needed to solve some of these problems is reduced to seconds.
For example, a few months ago I went to www.genforum.com and posted messages in several different surname forums asking if people had information on my ancestors. I left messages in the Buttrick, Wheeler and Wood surnames. After a few weeks some one gave me information on the Buttrick line that went back several generations, but no one knew anything about the Wheeler or Wood lines. Months went by and no one posted a reply. So when familysearch came on line I posted my quiry. In a few minutes I had a list of Lucy Wheelers to choose from and one matched exactly with birth date and children and husband. I pushed the pedigree button and suddenly I had ancestors back three generations. As I pointed and clicked I found ancestors going back generations and generations. Suddenly I discovered I was related to royalty. At first there was a duke, dutchess, count and countess, then a king and a queen and another and another until I was back 1300 years and I am reading my relationship to Charlemagne, King Henry III and Edward "Longshanks."
Could this be true? After being interested in genealogy for the last 10 years I always hoped I would uncover something special in our family tree, but I never dreamed of royalty being part of the make up. As my feet began to touch the floor again I began to ask myself about the significance of this revelation. First, is it significant? From a mathamatical point of view, 2^n is the number of members of the nth generation. If you go back 41 generations, you have 2 trillion members of that generation meaning there are way more members of that generation than the number of people on the planet then or now. So, how does this work? Is everyone related to everyone on the earth? Well, many people are multiple members of a generation. In fact, the royal family is famous for being inbred. Even more so, many small towns are also famous for being inbred. Even without being strictly "inbred" the greatgrandchildren of brothers and sisters may intermarry leaving a common ancester 4 generations back, and with that every previous ancestor is repeated multiple times.
So, what does this all mean? Well, there is a line of 27 generations from King Henry III to me, and a line of 41 generations from Charlemagne to me. This means those 27 or 41 people were in contact with each other and could pass information one to the next. Each of these people would be assumed to pass the most important information from one generation to the next. Somehow, the information pertaining to our relationship to royalty was never passed to me through my father, so we can only conclude this information was considered insignificant somewhere along the line. So, why should it be considered significant by me? Lets just say, its a personal significance, because some of my genetic material can be traced back more than a thousand years.
The question remains, is this significant? How could it be? After 41 generations is anything important? If it were possible to know what fraction of the European population is related to royality then some significance or insignificance could be placed on this based on this fraction. Unfortunately a great deal of information has been lost over the years.
Why was some information lost while other information was preserved? I believe the preservation of information is related to the relative wealth of the people in the family tree. If your ancestors children become disowned, or out of favor, their children will be less likely to be recorded for the birth, sacraments, marriage or death. Wealth generally marries wealth, and thus preserves the documentation for future generations.
Michael Forbush6-15-99
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