Everyone is Related to Everyone

But what does that really mean? James Tanner commented in a recent blog post (Genealogy is not a competitive sport) about family trees that contain thousands of names. He also made the point that having those large numbers is, for all intents and purposes, meaningless.

Anyone can add names to their family tree. And many only do just (or only) that, regardless of whether they can justify relationships.

But so what! If you want to go back a few million years we can make a case that we are all related. In reality we can confidently only go back a few hundred years - perhaps 15 generations. Beyond the early part of the 16^th century we are stretching credibility by listing ancestors or stating relationships. Few medieval records list the names of people, certainly true for the “common” people from whom most of us descend.

Many family historians want to latch on to the nobility which I think happens because only those few families published any kind of genealogical summaries. How many times have you seen someone’s tree that goes back to Charlemagne? That’s 30 to 40 generations.

Adam Rutherford poked a little fun about about relationships to the King of the Franks in a 24 May 2015 piece in The Guardian: So you’re related to Charlemagne? You and every other living European… He comments: “I am a direct descendent of someone of similar greatness: Charlemagne, Carolingian King of the Franks, Holy Roman Emperor, the great European conciliator. Quelle surprise!” He goes on to state, “This is merely a numbers game. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. But this ancestral expansion is not borne back ceaselessly into the past. If it were, your family tree when Charlemagne was Le Grand Fromage would harbour more than a billion ancestors – more people than were alive then.”

The absence of true records of the greater proportion of the population over the centuries before about AD 1300 compels many people to attach themselves to those who have been named in formal documents. Seemingly, if you can trace a connection to any member of a European royal family then you are a descendant of Charlemagne (see Descendants of Charlemagne).

There is also an assumption that many members of ruling or royal families had scores of illegitimate children who somehow became the ancestors of so many of us. I seriously doubt that is true as there has always been a much larger number of people unrelated to those families. Their descendants would logically still make up most of the population today. Connections to any branch of royalty are often very tentative, perhaps even more like wishful thinking.

If you want to go back to Numero Uno in terms of human evolution then we can probably say we are all related. But that analysis is meaningless for family history studies. DNA may help us find or confirm some familial relationships within a few generations and among some close cousins but it won’t tell the whole story about our families and that is what we are really after, aren’t we?

There should be reservations even using DNA, assuming we could get samples from people as far back as the 9^th century. One shares less than 1% of their DNA with their 6^th great-grandparents which would make you wonder whether you can even truly demonstrate a blood relationship. The number is not even statistically relevant going back past 20 generations.

Going back to another post by James Tanner (Sourcecentric Genealogy), to conclusively show relationships or connections to past generations, one must work with bona fide historical records. Even some royal families’ trees or publication of them may be more fiction than fact so researchers must go beyond the summaries to find actual church or other records. And, again, any document dated earlier than the 14^th century should be used with caution.

So, is everyone related to everyone else? Only in the most general, biological sense but not in any meaningful one with regard to family history!

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 3: Drought

Many people researching their families’ history in North America will have ancestors that survived the Dustbowl of the 1930s. Nature’s attack of drought was most concentrated in the states of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas but it effects were felt in many other regions. One result of the drying up of the farmlands of the plains region was a forced migration of hundreds of thousands of people, most going west to California.

 

Left – Dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas – 18 April 1935 (credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, George E. Marsh); Right – Map of states and counties affected by the Dust Bowl between 1935 and 1938 originally prepared by the Soil Conservation Service. The most severely affected counties are coloured darker red. (Source: Soil Science and Resource Assessment, Resource Assessment Division, United States Department of Agriculture; retrieved 23 May 2017) 

Drought is basically a condition where there is a lack of water resources. According to researchers Gwyneth Cole and Terry Marsh (2006), of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxfordshire, droughts may be caused be due to a deficiency of rainfall (meteorological drought), accumulated deficiencies in runoff or aquifer charge (hydrological drought) or limited water presentg in the soil during the growing season (agricultural drought). The primary parameters of a drought, though, are a lack of precipitation over an extended period of time and affecting a large area.

The drought that affected parts of the Midwest United States in the 1930s is one example that is engraved on recent human memory. Another is the recent arid years in California. This particular drought was predicted by many august individuals and organizations to last a millenium. It was ended, though, as many are, by record rainfall earlier this year. Not to say it cannot or will not happen again. Of course it will. That is the prime characteristic of the natural world – change!

Droughts have been part of natural events for millions of years in all parts of the world. With regard to human history, both recorded and ancient, droughts have played a significant role in the destruction of communities – even whole societies when they played out over long time periods. Many periods of severe drought have been documented in Europe over the last 500 years (Garnier et al, 2015) which resulted in thousands of people leaving their homes to find more hospitable areas.

North America has many examples:

• ·         The Terminal Classic Drought coincided with the demise of the Mayan civilization between AD 750 and 1050 (Gill, 2000).
• ·         Between AD 990 and 1300 there were three intense and persistent droughts in the central and southwest part of the US, each lasting decades. They all had severe impacts on natives that resulted in migration of the people and even collapse of their cultures (Jones et al, 1999).
• ·         Droughts affected early colonists on Roanoke Island (Virginia) between 1587 and 1589 and again between 1606 and 1612 at Jamestown (I wrote about this event in a blog post in September 2016 titled What if…?) The conditions were the driest in the region in 800 years and resulted in high death rates and the abandonment of both habitations.
• ·         The Civil War Drought (1856-1865) is considered to be the most severe in more modern times, possibly rivalling that of the Medieval period (AD 750-1300).

Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park, Colorade (photo by Lorax) 

Family historians may come across evidence that such natural phenomena have affected their own families, at different times and in different regions. Sometimes short-lived and sometimes over extended time periods, drought can, and did have devastating impacts on living conditions.

References:

Cole, G. A. & Marsh, T. J. (2006). An historical analysis of drought in England and Wales. In Climate Variability and Change – Hydrological Impacts (Demuth, S., Gustard, A., Planos, E., Scatena, F. & Servat, E., Eds.). International Association of Hydrological Sciences, publication number 308, pp. 483-489.

Garnier, E., Assimacopoulos, D. & van Lanen, H. W. J. (2015). Historic droughts beyond the modern instrumental records: an analysis of cases in United Kingdom, France, Rhine and Syros. DROUGHT R SPI Technical Report No 35.

Gill, R. B. (2000). The Great Maya Droughts: Water, Life, and Death. University of New Mexico.

Jones, T. L., Brown, G. M., Raab, L. M., McVickar, J. L., Spaulding, W. G., Kennett, D. J., York, A. & Walker, P. L. (1999). Environmental Imperatives Reconsidered: Demographic Crises in Western North America during the Medieval Climatic Anomaly. Current Anthropology, (40/3), pp. 137-170.

You Can’t Keep Everything

There have been many articles and blog posts about preserving memorabilia. I try to read as many as I can find because I have a great deal of “stuff” I’d like to keep and pass along to others who might be interested in having it.

I wrote a while back about preserving pictures in photo albums for future generations by scanning the books and putting the images online (Digitizing Memories). That way, no matter where family members live they will be able to access them and copy them if they wish.

Like all family historians, I have collected birth, marriage and death certificates, wills, census records and other personal documents. I still have all our children’s report cards and many school artwork projects. The school material has also been scanned and is online where our kids and their kids can read them. Many documents were obtained in digital format and are stored on my computer (and saved in the cloud) rather than in hard copy in binders. Bit by bit I am weeding out the paper copies and discarding them – except for the original records handed down from previous generations.

My goal is to lighten the load for future generations by keeping only physical memorabilia – like the cream can and pitch fork that belonged to my grandfather – and official records that were actually owned and used by family members. My children may not have the room (or the interest) to store the material, so I will likely contact an archives office to see if they might be interested in having the documents, antiques and other memorabilia.

I read a recent blog post by Melissa Barker on Geneabloggers of interest (The Archive Lade: Preserving Old Negatives). She described how to preserve the original films. Many of us have these, either in envelopes attached to photo albums or in protective archival sleeves. I still have hundreds of negatives and slides that go back to my school days.

 

Some of my old negatives

I also have a box of negatives and several loose ones in photo storage sheets for pictures my parents took as far back as the 1920s. My Dad developed most of his own photos, so many of the negatives were still in rolls, tucked away together in boxes.

 

Some of my Dad's old negatives

The problem, as I found out when I went to have some of them printed again, is that there is no place left that does photofinishing using negatives. They have all gone to digital reproduction. What they will do is scan the negatives and then make prints or give you digital images for you to store. That sounds ok until they give you the price which can be several dollars per picture. For most of us that is totally unrealistic and means the negatives will continue to languish in the boxes they have been in for decades.

I keep all this stuff because, “You never know when you or someone else might want them!” They are still around mostly because they are part of our memories and history and I have a hard time throwing things away.

As much as it pains me, though, negatives and slides are not much good any more unless they can be digitally preserved. And then they really wouldn’t be the actual originals anyway. If the prints from those negatives are properly mounted in albums for people to look at the pages could then be scanned. Then at least you have and can see the documentation of those memories.

My wife keeps telling me, “You can’t keep everything.” That is true but it will likely be someone else who gets rid of it after I’m gone.

Wayne Shepheard is a retired geologist and active genealogist. He volunteers with the Online Parish Clerk program in England, handling four parishes in Devon, England. He has published a number of articles about various aspects of genealogy in several family history society journals. Wayne has also served as an editor of two such publications. He provides genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated.