July 03, 2009
NOOOOOOO!!!!!!
I just found out I'm related to the Bush's, Sarah Palin, and the Romney's. My mother's maiden name was Arnold, and we're direct descendants of Benedict Arnold. The shame of that name is nothing compared to being kinfolk with the former.
Apparently there's some 80,000 of us in the US alone. You may be in our growing number...
Now, I'm a Californian by birth. Just b/c my family believes in keeping our strong genes in the family is no reason to conflate my current domicile with Appalachian parentage.
It is comforting thinking I may be related to Natedogg though.
If I were Cablinasian (http://www.salon.com/april97/tiger970430.html), I could claim much closer heritage to many more people though.
You can partially fix the numbers without actual incest. Multiple unions between families (eg, a guy from family A (guyA) marries a woman from family B (womanB), and the brother of guyA marries the cousin of womanB. There's no concentration of familial recessive genes, but it still reduces the ancestor pool/descendant count. That sort of thing was fairly common in my tree in the 1600s and 1700s, and, not to open myself up TOO much to incest jokes, but it also occurred in my dad's parents' generation (I have a second and third cousin once removed either way, just like Bilbo/Frodo).
Third cousins are barely related anyway. Brother and sister are roughly 50%, which means that cousins are reoughly 25%, 2nd cousins, 12.5%, and third cousins are less than 10%.
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If it makes you feel better, for any given person of somewhat similar racial stock either a) you almost certainly share an ancestor or b) one or both of you have incestuous family trees.
Ignoring your West Virginian origins, you have ~8k ancestors at the 13 generation mark (~390 yrs, 30 yr/generation). If on average each couple raises three offspring to reproducing age, those 4,000 couples would have 4.3 billion descendants. This is clearly too high -- the incest assumption can't strictly hold. (A 17-generation tree with no overlap and no generational population growth -- 2 kids per couple -- has 65k ancestors and 8.5B descendants. Requiring no overlap is what makes the tree explode.) Still, accounting for some incest and limited mobility, if you and another person have even one geographic region of ancestry in common you should only have to go back a dozen or so generations for a shared relative.
posted by mrflip at 02:53AM CST on July 04