Genealogy and History

 I was listening to a podcast — Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History — where Dan was, again, explaining history in his wonderful way of colorizing the past, when he was ruminating about the many wars and unsettling events that had occurred in the part of the world he was talking about, the Near East, what we call today the Middle East.

It occurred to me that there are two different fields of study (of the past) that aren’t often connected in people’s minds, yet should be intimately intertwined — History and Genealogy.

Now, I’ve been a genealogy buff for years (thanks, Mormons!), and yes, I’ve tried where I could to fill in the “human interest” story where I could. Human record keeping, however, unless you are wealthy and influential, is always rather sparse on color. So, it’s hard.

But Dan got me thinking.

Genealogists usually think of a generation as being about 40 years, on average, but I found a generation calculator that uses 30 years. Using it, if you go back a thousand years (to your 29th great grandparents) you’d have a cumulative number of ancestors of over 4.1 million people.

Now, that’s a hell of a lot of bodies, folks. In fact, that would mean that most of us with Central European ancestry are more than likely something like 29th cousins or maybe cousins that many times removed. But related. A few years back, I began getting our DNA tested through Ancestry.com. It turned out to be interesting.

Europe

Europe West 43%

Scandinavia 31%

Great Britain 12%

Ireland 10%

Trace Regions

Italy/Greece < 1%

Iberian Peninsula < 1%

West Asia

Trace Regions

Caucasus 1%

Middle East < 1%

I have no clue as to how far back some of that may go. Trace regions? Are those odd marriages or are they representative of rapes? Incidental children caused by liaisons with travelers? Children of slaves taken in warfare? Impossible to know.

Europe is easy — I’ve got German ancestry on both my dad’s and mother’s sides. My mother also has a large amount of her ancestry from Great Britain & Ireland, meaning Celts and/or Normans, and the Scandinavians were either through the Norman connection or a result of direct Viking conquest of English/Scottish/Irish territory in GB. All mixed up, in fact.

But the other trace areas indicate some interesting connection possibilities!

Italy/Greece could be Roman influence. The Iberian peninsula, of course, indicates some possible Spanish ancestry, or maybe Basque or Portuguese.

Now, the West Asian could be any number of different things, including Steppe tribes, anywhere around Turkey, Georgia, as far east as Pakistan, or anywhere in the Middle East, and man, that opens a possible can of worms! Most of mankind has been through that area at one point or another.

I’m a real mongrel, aren’t I? So, maybe I’m not as related to as many Europeans as I might have thought!

But that brings up the history connection here. That DNA, however the experts may have counted the various profiles, goes way back, doesn’t it? Humans have been around since Africa over a third of a million years ago. That’s a lot of generations! Enough to be able to say that really and truly, we ARE all related at some point going back far enough. After all, DNA studies have pinpointed some bottlenecks in our past where humanity had fewer than just a few tens of thousands of individuals. In fact, given the realities of evolution, our ancestry goes way back to simple single celled life almost a billion years ago.

We’ve had a lot of time to have babies and walk all around the globe!

But in so doing, we’ve also fought a lot of wars, migrated all over, pushing other groups out of our way, been pushed out of others’ way, treated others quite brutally and been treated just as badly at times. Collectively, we’ve killed a lot of each other. Yet, somehow, over the thousands of years since mankind began settling into place and farming and building cities, those groups containing members of my ancestors have managed to stay alive and protect them so they could all pass along their genes to me. Each generation lived long enough to have children and at least see those kids survive.

Who knows what crucial DNA pieces may have been different if just a few of those folks hadn’t made it? Enough to make the body not me? Could a few changes have just caused me to have different color hair, for instance? Or been taller or shorter, blue eyes or green?

Or would ANY change just have made this person a completely different person, not me?

My ancestors endured wars, migrations, possibly generations of wandering the steppes of Asia, or the plains of Central Europe. Some of them may have been fighting with the Greeks at Thermopylae or on the other side with the Persians! Or both. Some were certainly German farmers, probably peasants or maybe a little better off. Some came from the sea and conquered areas of Scotland or Ireland and possibly England and mixed their seed with the Celts already there. Some may have settled in Normandy and could have invaded England with William. Many of them probably endured the Thirty Years Wars in Germany between the Church and Protestants.

However they did all that, they either survived or left their kids behind them to grow and have more kids.

Till me. Now, I have kids and grandkids. The generations march on. People still fight wars and kill one another in myriads of ways, but we either pass on our genes or not. For every child born who survives to have more kids, remember, their DNA has survived countless generations of blood, sweat and tears to get where it is.

Let’s try to limit the damage, Ok? Give peace a chance.