Steve Olson makes some critical mistakes.
First, we are not all related at least not like he was trying to say. You can't make a math model and prove it. Besides if you could it would immediately disprove the Theory of Evolution. People who say it is too complicated to figure out where we come from are flat around. Much like the people who said the world was flat. They are simply and utterly wrong.
How?
Simple. Take the concept that Chang's model would have the common relatives at 1000 AD. We would have more common ancestors then we would have have people alive. This would make the concept that we were billions of years old impossible. Could you imagine if we have this much problem in 1012 years what would the the population of the world have been 1 million or 2 million years ago.
The concept that many people inter-married is a common thread in genealogy. That is what makes genealogy both exciting and a science. My relatives came from Ireland as well. They came from County Cork. Mr. Olson was correct it is very hard to trace the roots of your relatives if they were common people. However, if you were related to a Royal Family things are much different and very easy to find information.
What is fascinating to me is that we should all learn where we came from and only through this knowledge can we truly gain the concept of who we are.
The Royal We
The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that
everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and
everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne
Afew years ago the Genealogical Office in Dublin moved
from a back room of the Heraldic Museum up the street to the National
Library. The old office wasn't big enough for all the people stopping by
to track down their Irish ancestors, and even the new, much larger
office is often crowded. Because of its history of oppression and
Catholic fecundity, Ireland has been a remarkably productive exporter of
people. The population of the island has never exceeded 10 million, but
more than 70 million people worldwide claim Irish ancestry. On warm
summer days, as tourists throng nearby Trinity College and Dublin
Castle, the line of visitors waiting to consult one of the office's
professional genealogists can stretch out the door.
I suspect that many people have had a fling with genealogy somewhat
like mine. In my office I have a file containing the scattered lines of
Olsons and Taylors, Richmans and Sigginses (my Irish ancestors), that I
gathered several years ago in a paroxysm of family-mindedness. For the
most part my ancestors were a steady stream of farmers, ministers, and
malcontents. Yet a few of the Old World lines hint at something
grander—they include a couple of knights, and even a baron. I've never
taken the trouble to find out, but I bet with a little work I could
achieve that nirvana of genealogical research, demonstrated descent from
a royal family.
Earlier this year I went to Dublin to learn more about the Irish
side of my family and to talk about genealogy with Mark Humphrys, a
young computer scientist at Dublin City University. Humphrys has dark
hair, deep-blue eyes, heavily freckled arms, and a pasty complexion. He
became interested in genealogy as a teenager, after hearing romantic
stories about his ancestors' roles in rebellions against the English.
But when he tried to trace his family further into the past, the trail
ran cold. The Penal Laws imposed by England in the early eighteenth
century forbade Irish Catholics from buying land or joining professions,
which meant that very few permanent records of their existence were
generated. "Irish people of Catholic descent are almost completely cut
off from the past," Humphrys told me, as we sat in his office
overlooking a busy construction site. (Dublin City University, which
specializes in information technology and the life sciences, is growing
as rapidly as the northern Dublin suburb in which it is located.) "The
great irony about Ireland is that even though we have this long, rich
history, almost no person of Irish-Catholic descent can directly connect
to that history."
While a graduate student at Cambridge University, Humphrys fell in
love with and married an Englishwoman, and investigating her genealogy
proved more fruitful. Her family knew that they were descended from an
illegitimate son of the tenth Earl of Pembroke. After just a couple of
hours in the Cambridge library, Humphrys showed that the Earl of
Pembroke was a direct descendant of Edward III, making Humphrys's wife
the King's great-granddaughter twenty generations removed. Humphrys
began to gather other genealogical tidbits related to English royalty.
Many of the famous Irish rebels he'd learned about in school turned out
to have ancestors who had married into prominent Protestant families,
which meant they were descended from English royalty. The majority of
American presidents were also of royal descent, as were many of the
well-known families of Europe.
Humphrys began to notice something odd. Whenever a reliable family
tree was available, almost anyone of European ancestry turned out to be
descended from English royalty—even such unlikely people as Hermann
Göring and Daniel Boone. Humphrys began to think that such descent was
the rule rather than the exception in the Western world, even if
relatively few people had the documents to demonstrate it.
Humphrys compiled his family genealogies first on paper and then
using computers. He did much of his work on royal genealogies in the
mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web was just coming into general use. He
began to put his findings on Web pages, with hyperlinks connecting
various lines of descent. Suddenly dense networks of ancestry jumped out
at him. "I'd known these descents were interconnected, but I'd never
known how much," he told me. "You can't see the connections reading the
printed genealogies, because it's so hard to jump from tree to tree. The
problem is that genealogies aren't two-dimensional, so any attempt to
put them on paper is more or less doomed from the start. They aren't
three-dimensional, either, or you could make a structure. They have
hundreds of dimensions."
Much of Humphrys's genealogical research now appears on his Web
page Royal Descents of Famous People. Sitting in his office, I asked him
to show me how it works. He clicked on the name Walt Disney. Up popped a
genealogy done by Brigitte Gastel Lloyd (Humphrys links to the work of
others whenever possible) showing the twenty-two generations separating
Disney from Edward I. Humphrys pointed at the screen. "Here we have a
sir, so this woman is the daughter of a knight. Maybe this woman will
marry nobility, but there's a limited pool of nobility, so eventually
someone here is going to marry someone who's just wealthy. Then one of
their children could marry someone who doesn't have that much money. In
ten generations you can easily get from princess to peasant."
The idea that virtually anyone with a European ancestor
descends from English royalty seems bizarre, but it accords perfectly
with some recent research done by Joseph Chang, a statistician at Yale
University. The mathematics of our ancestry is exceedingly complex,
because the number of our ancestors increases exponentially, not
linearly. These numbers are manageable in the first few generations—two
parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen
great-great-grandparents—but they quickly spiral out of control. Go back
forty generations, or about a thousand years, and each of us
theoretically has more than a trillion direct ancestors—a figure that
far exceeds the total number of human beings who have ever lived.
In a 1999 paper titled "Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day
Individuals," Chang showed how to reconcile the potentially huge number
of our ancestors with the quantities of people who actually lived in the
past. His model is a mathematical proof that relies on such
abstractions as Poisson distributions and Markov chains, but it can
readily be applied to the real world. Under the conditions laid out in
his paper, the most recent common ancestor of every European today
(except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in
Europe in the surprisingly recent past—only about 600 years ago. In
other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the
same man or woman who lived around 1400. Before that date, according to
Chang's model, the number of ancestors common to all Europeans today
increased, until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation
prevailed: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn
out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no
children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of
the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every
European living today.
Chang's model incorporates one crucial assumption: random mating in
the part of the world under consideration. For example, every person in
Europe would have to have an equal chance of marrying every other
European of the opposite sex. As Chang acknowledges in his paper, random
mating clearly does not occur in reality; an Englishman is much
likelier to marry a woman from England than a woman from Italy, and a
princess is much likelier to marry a prince than a pauper. These
departures from randomness must push back somewhat the date of
Europeans' most recent common ancestor.
But Humphrys's Web page suggests that over many generations mating
patterns may be much more random than expected. Social mobility accounts
for part of the mixing—what Voltaire called the slippered feet going
down the stairs as the hobnailed boots ascend them. At the same time,
revolutions overturn established orders, countries invade and colonize
other countries, and people sometimes choose mates from far away rather
than from next door. Even the world's most isolated peoples—Pacific
islanders, for example—continually exchange potential mates with
neighboring groups.
This constant churning of people makes it possible to apply Chang's
analysis to the world as a whole. For example, almost everyone in the
New World must be descended from English royalty—even people of
predominantly African or Native American ancestry, because of the long
history of intermarriage in the Americas. Similarly, everyone of
European ancestry must descend from Muhammad. The line of descent for
which records exist is through the daughter of the Emir of Seville, who
is reported to have converted from Islam to Catholicism in about 1200.
But many other, unrecorded descents must also exist.
Chang's model has even more dramatic implications. Because people
are always migrating from continent to continent, networks of descent
quickly interconnect. This means that the most recent common ancestor of
all six billion people on earth today probably lived just a couple of
thousand years ago. And not long before that the majority of the people
on the planet were the direct ancestors of everyone alive today.
Confucius, Nefertiti, and just about any other ancient historical figure
who was even moderately prolific must today be counted among everyone's
ancestors.
Toward the end of our conversation Humphrys pointed out something I
hadn't considered. The same process works going forward in time; in
essence every one of us who has children and whose line does not go
extinct is suspended at the center of an immense genetic hourglass. Just
as we are descended from most of the people alive on the planet a few
thousand years ago, several thousand years hence each of us will be an
ancestor of the entire human race—or of no one at all.
The dense interconnectedness of the human family might seem to take
some of the thrill out of genealogical research. Sure, I was able to
show in the Genealogical Office that my Siggins ancestors are descended
from the fourteenth-century Syggens of County Wexford; but I'm also
descended from most of the other people who lived in Ireland in the
fourteenth century. Humphrys took issue with my disillusionment. It's
true that everyone's roots go back to the same family tree, he said. But
each path to our common past is different, and reconstructing that
path, using whatever records are available, is its own reward. "You can
ask whether everyone in the Western world is descended from Charlemagne,
and the answer is yes, we're all descended from Charlemagne. But can
you prove it? That's the game of genealogy."
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