Trying to explain bloodlines

[Marthe48]

My nephew, my sister's son, doesn't think people remain related after a few generations, such as generational cousins. I'm not a serious student of our genealogy, but I like tracing relationships through the years. I tried to explain to him, but he just rolled his eyes. I told him it could be important if he were a distant relative of someone rich or famous.

My best example is that my husband, to whom my nephew is related to through his cousins, is probably related to President Monroe, through his wife, Elizabeth Cortright, and President Monroe's children with her. So I think my nephew is indirectly related to President Monroe through our children, his cousins.

Even if all people don't keep track of their relatives, I think we all are related to a lot more people than we'd think.

[DURHAM D]

1. I stopped working on genealogy after

I got back 30 generations on the English (royalty) side of the family. I decided I was related to e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e and didn't care anymore.

[Marthe48]

9. I have a couple interests

I'm pretty sure of the origin of 3 of 4 grandparents. But I wonder how my Dad's father's family got to Saline Mills, Illinois. I've been trying to track that part of the family for a few years off and on, but with names like Davis and Smith, it isn't easy.

[DURHAM D]

14. Do you subscribe to ancestory? nt

[Marthe48]

17. I've just used library resources

and I don't remember is Ancestry is one of those. I've used the Mormon records, Rootsweb, vital records and 3rd Page(?) In Ohio, if you have a library card, you can log on and access a lot of genealogy records for free. I haven't done any searching for awhile, so I don't recall the other ones I use. But I love logging on from home and doing as much searching as I want to. I found my great-grandmother's marriage license.

[virgogal]

2. I'm with your nephew......I really don'care.

[3Hotdogs]

3. My kids are decendent of George Clinton, Jefferson's Vice President.

Guess what? They don't care.

[seaglass]

4. Your nephew doesn't share any bloodlines with your husband unless I am missing

something somewhere.

I love genealogy but don't care about famous or rich people, just interested in how different people lived their lives at different times and locations. I have some family members interested in info about our family and some that couldn't care less. I think that's normal.

[Marthe48]

10. I thought

but haven't asked about blood lines. Here's what I thought: My nephew is related by blood to our daughters. His Mom is my sister, so through my side shares a blood relationship with his cousins, and could claim a blood relationship to any people he is related to through his cousins. So I thought because he is related to my daughters, he could claim cousinhood to the cousins our daughters are related to on their Dad's side (removed, or related by marriage?) It looks like I need to understand blood relationships much better!

[seaglass]

13. Well, think of it as DNA rather than blood as it pretty much means the same thing.

Your nephew shares DNA with your children because you share DNA with your sister. Neither your sister nor your nephew share any DNA with your husband. Your husband being your nephew's uncle I would call a social relationship, not a biological relationship.

[Marthe48]

18. I understand

I am thinking of cousin<cousin>cousin

[wasupaloopa]

5. I feel that my distant relatives are no more a part of

me than the next person I run into on the street.

23 & me sells your DNA information to researchers. You pay to give your data to someone who sells it for profit.

Then you believe that way back in time your distant relative was queen of whateverland and that means you are graced with the ability to rule your coworkers and friends.

[Marthe48]

11. I am not interested enough to have my dna tested

and have it part of the genome, and perhaps have it used negatively against me.

If you believe fortune tellers and dna tests, then we were all related to royalty. lol We accidentally discovered the link to Pres. Monroe's wife Elizabeth Kortright. My brother-in-law had traced his father's family back in time and found that they were related to Kortrights. When we toured The White House, we saw Elizabeth's portrait. (who knew her maiden name?!) so we told my b-i-l and it seems like it all fits.

We didn't intend to stick up our noses, just thought it was a cool discovery.

[wasupaloopa]

16. My brother got his dna tested. He was told he came

from North Africa.

Our mothers parents were from Naples. Our dad’s family came from Scotland.

Go figure

[Marthe48]

19. The ads highlight results like that

But I hear that you can get different results from different DNA tests.
It is so cool that you know the city your grandparents were from. I need that info for 3 of the 4 great grandparents.

[Karadeniz]

6. The only ancestry I'd be interested in is what previous lives my soul has occupied and if I

Succeeded in developing soul or why not.

[WePurrsevere]

7. You remain 'related' generations back but...

you may not share any DNA.

This is a commonly used chart, put out by 'DNA Detectives', that shows how as few go back further in generations/time there's an increasing likelihood that we may not share enough DNA to be picked up.



As an adoptee who found her biological families using DNA tests and genetic genealogy I get a big kick out of finally being ABLE to learn the history of 'my' people my roots. My eldest daughter has been enjoying it too and a couple of my grandchildren are interested ATM as well. (We now also occasionally try to help fellow adoptees, etc find their missing 'puzzle pieces' aka bio families using Genetic Genealog.)

Anyway, I find that most people who get into genealogy aren't looking to find that they're related to famous people, that's just a fun bit of trivia. Most of us seem to find history interesting and enjoy finding our personal connections to that and yes, I agree that we're definitely related to much more than we think. I've long felt that we're connected to each other in a sort of 'web of life'. Genealogy, especially genetic genealogy, has only helped strengthen that image for me.

[Marthe48]

12. Thanks for the chart and explanation

I took several biology courses, and was thinking of what I learned from those. Also thinking of Thoroughbred horses and their bloodlines and purebred dogs and their bloodlines. Albert Peyson Terhune mentioned that people who owned dogs could tell you 8 or more generations of the dogs' ancestry, but people were lucky to remember their grandparents' names. I checked with my parents and grandmother, so at least I wrote down my great-grandparents' names.

I liked knowing where my family came from. Some of the family stories seem to come true if I find information such as wedding certificates. And I have a few family heirlooms which are linked to stories I heard. If I pass them along, I can maybe pass true stories with them.

Glad that you are finding your roots. That is a really good reason to have an interest in genealogy.

[WePurrsevere]

15. Taking biology definitely helps...

With learning genetic even even though my knowledge was more than a bit out of date.

I know exactly what you mean about some purebred oeners/breeders. I had a friend show me her dogs bloodline one time and I was a bit jealous that the dog had more info about its roots than I did about mine.

If you have special family heirlooms that's wonderful! We inherited a plethora of my husband's family treasures and I know he wishes he knew the stories behind them. I had tried to get his mom to write things down so I could put them in an envelope and keep them in or with things but she procrastinated too long and now all that info is sadly gone.

[Marthe48]

20. Don't feel too bad

A lot of the stories my Mom told me turned out to be not possible. I collect antiques, and insight from research helps me understand part of the story. I'd need a time machine to get all the details.

I had biology in h.s. and was drawn to it. I took some more courses in college, and it was right when cell biology was taking off, so genetics was a big part of all the classes. I stayed interested, but no formal path since school.

[Spider Jerusalem]

21. That chart is only about averages, though

I've found shared DNA with some relatives as distant as 7th or 8th cousin (my mother has a cluster of matches who share 30-40cM whose closest relationship to each other is 7C-7C1R).

[WePurrsevere]

23. Yes, that's correct and there's always the possibility...

of an outlier that's higher or lower that average. Sometimes it's luck of the draw and sometimes higher than average could indicate endogamy.

FWIW, here's where I originally came across the green chart above. The DNA Geek is a very good source and explains things further here if anyone is interested:
https://thednageek.com/the-limits-of-predicting-relationships-using-dna/

[Spider Jerusalem]

24. ISOGG (the International Society of Genetic Genealogy) has some useful references as well:

https://isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal_DNA_statistics

A lot of my and my mother's DNA matches are significantly affected by endogamy--a lot of my ancestors were Maryland Catholic colonists who intermarried within the same community for 200-300 years; I have almost no pedigree collapse, but I still have DNA matches who share as many as 2 dozen common ancestors between 1650 and 1750 (my most distant DNA matches on GEDmatch etc where I can verify common ancestors are 7C2R/8C1R, with shared DNA in the range of 18-20cM). The effect of endogamy is pretty evident in looking at my DNA matches on Ancestry as well, where there are a huge number of matches with distinctive colonial Maryland surnames like Mudd, Craycroft, and Edelen (all of those are in my direct line, none more recently than the early 1700's).

[Marthe48]

8. WOW good information

Thanks for adding to the discussion!

[Spider Jerusalem]

22. If you're an American with colonial ancestry...

then you're almost certainly related to a huge number of more-or-less famous or notable people. I'm related to four presidents that I know of: Truman, Clinton, Bush II and Obama--Truman and Obama are also related to each other; they're both descendants of Mareen Duvall, a French Huguenot who settled in Maryland (his other descendants include Dick Cheney, Warren Buffett, Robert Duvall, Supreme Court justice Gabriel Duvall, film director John Waters, and yours truly); I'm also related to a surprising number of more-or-less famous people like Francis Scott Key, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dr. Samuel Mudd (who set John Wilkes Booth's broken leg), Roger B. Taney (author of the worst Supreme Court decision ever), WWII-era pinup and actress Betty Grable, Queen Elizabeth II, several governors and US Senators, Alamo casualty Jim Bowie, Fred Rogers, etc.

[Marthe48]

25. That's incredible!

Sounds like you've done a lot of research, or your family keeps detailed records. My husband's family on both sides came to America early. On his Mom's side, someone came over on the 2nd crossing of the Mayflower. There was a website called The Spotted Cow, which might have been amed for a ship, but my brother-in-law found information about his dad's side there.

[Spider Jerusalem]

34. A lot of research

nearly 20 years ago I read an article in a magazine about the LDS church and their efforts to put genealogical records online; I got kind of curious and went to the FamilySearch website and put in my surname and my father's birthplace, and found a family tree for my male line back to the first immigrant to the colonies (that turned out, surprisingly, to be mostly accurate), who arrived in Northampton County, Virginia in the 1660's and later settled on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. A bit more research on my mother's side led me to several Ark and Dove passengers (the Catholic Mayflower, basically; the ships that brought the first Catholic colonists to Maryland in 1634); as it turned out a lot of my colonial lines had been fairly well researched by the time I discovered my connnections to them.

[unblock]

26. geneaology is no fun at all when your mother is a holocaust survivor

i have a chart somewhere with information about her grandparents and cousins, but that's all.
there were a few names of relatives she knew but much of her family and all the records were destroyed in the holocaust.

i have rather more names on my father's side, mostly cousins, though. his father was from a family of eight and his mother was from a family of seven, so he has a large number of cousins and i have a huge number of second cousins. still, not very far back even on that side, more because records simply weren't kept very well.

[Marthe48]

29. You have my sympathy

I know a family in Brazil, who were from Poland. Grandfather tried to emigrate to the U.S before WWII, but was refused. He made it to Brazil, but most of the people in his home city died in the Holocaust. When I met him, I gave him a little pair of wooden shoes, which had been carved in Poland before the war. He was so happy to see them, and told his family about them, who interpreted his story from Polish to Portuguese to English for me, so I knew more about them. That moment made the Holocaust more real to me. He was a young man when he left and his family wanted hom safe. He lived, they all died. God.



.

[unblock]

32. my mother and her parents were evicted

they came to take away the jewish families from the apartment building. the super said there were three units with jewish families.
they took one jewish family from the first floor, and two jewish families living together in one unit on the second floor, so they never looked on the third floor.

when the super later saw my parents he said he had to evict them on the spot, saying he couldn't even let them return to their apartment. so they had to leave with literally nothing but the clothes on their backs. they used the small amount of money they had access to to pay smugglers to get them to belgium, and later to england and then america.

they cut it very close more than once as the nazis invaded belgium only a couple weeks after they finally got out of there.


so hard to imagine, and yet some much the same going on right here, right now. i hope we turn away from the dangerous path we're on....

[Marthe48]

33. Harrowing story

They were very lucky to survive.

Yes, almost the same thing is going on here. So easy to make others the enemy. Just scare ignorant people into thinking there isn't enough of anything to live, and say that the immigrants/refugees/migrants are going to take it all. I hope that the people trying to come to this country survive this discrimination and mistreatment.

[LeftInTX]

35. I'm 1/2 Armenian and there is nothing after my great grandparents

I even have some cousins, but have no idea how we are related. (One shows up as a distant match on ancestry)


My great grandfather even wrote a book, but he was so old school. The language is impossible to learn. Even when translated, he wrote in a very hyperbolic, prosaic style.

I found a great grandmother at Ellis Island. She was deported from there. I have no idea what happened to her.

[Doreen]

27. I do not study this stuff

but I have talked to some people who's family on both sides are white but about 5 or 6 generations back there was a black person who entered the family but as the generations moved on the family once returned to white until one day someone has a baby who is black or very dark skinned and no the mother was not having an affair. Wouldn't that mean we are still related through many past generations? I have also been told the same thing about children with red hair that did not exist on either side but one several generations before.

[Marthe48]

30. Our genes mix every time a baby is made

Some of the genes are recessive, some are dominant. If you get the right mix, some of the recessive gene characters appear. I'd say that only one black person in a long line of white people would make the genes less numerous, but the genes got a chance to show in the baby you mentioned. My very white (almost albino, no pink eyes) nephew married a lady who is black, but very light. Their daughter is pale and blond like her Dad, but she has the curliest hair. She is a real beauty. The little girl is young and like all the other kids, sometimes she looks like her dad, or someone in our family and other times, she looks like her Mom, or someone in her family. My grand kids are a little older than she is, and their looks are still changing too.

[matt819]

28. What I think

It's not really all that important to know, or believe, that I'm a descendant of royalty or peasantry. On my side of the family, it's peasants. On my wife's side, it's just folks, some high-born, some low, some distant cousins important in one way or another in American history. The details are unimportant. What I think is valuable is understanding where you come from. The threats and risks that confronted our ancestors, the challenges, the losses, the wins, the sacrifices. No, it doesn't really change anything in my life, but somehow it means something that my grandparents survived the pogroms and made her way to the US in the late 19th century. Why? Because it was part of my 90-year-old mother's childhood and history. We do not exist in a vacuum. And to some degree that knowledge, that awareness, deserves to be incorporated into how we see the world today. Just saying.

[Marthe48]

31. I think you can develop character

I found out about 20 years ago from my Dad's 2nd cousin, that my Dad's grandfather walked through a snowstorm to get medicine for his sick baby, my grandfather's baby brother. The baby died anyway, and my grandfather fell ill and died a few weeks later. I cried when I learned the story, the heroism and futility, the loss my great-grandmother suffered. She remarried and had 8 more children. Tough, strong woman. So I agree, learning stories like that add meaning to my life.

[franzwohlgemuth]

36. The things is...

My Irish side can be traced to a General in Brian Baru's army at the battle of Clontarf. He was granted nobility... While it gives my blood line a history, it does nothing for me today.
Nice to know? Absolutely. Something to be proud of (being related to someone connected to an historical event)? Sure. Relevant to today? Not really. So, enjoy the history/connection to events. In the long run, it changes nothing.