Ancestor Surfing
Looking back 50 generations
This is not only one man, this is the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns,
In him the start of populous states and rich republics,
Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.
How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries?
(Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries).
— I Sing the Body Electric, Walt Whitman
Following clues from a genealogy book covering my mother’s family (The Cary-Estes Genealogy) and using Wikipedia and thepeerage.com, and then getting more details from ancestry.com, I was able to trace my family ancestry back more than 50 generations.
The crucial line was from Charles Fleming (1659–1717) to his father John (1627–1686) to his grandfather Alexander (1612–1668) to his great-grandfather John, the Second Earl of Wigton (1589–1650), and his great-great-grandfather John, First Earl of Wigton (1567–1619). That was clarified and confirmed by My Ancestors and Relatives: “The cited information was published by Copyright © 1987, June 1998, data as of 5 January 1998, held in Family History Library. The author/originator was The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” John, the father of Charles, and Alexander, the grandfather of Charles, were both born in Scotland and died in Virginia. (The Cary-Estes Genealogy had speculated that Charles was the son of John, who was the son of Sir Thomas Fleming [instead of Alexander], a son of John, the First Earl of Wigton, but only based on scattered references and family tradition.)
The line from Lord John Fleming, First Earl of Wigton, and his wife Lilas Graham leads back to King James IV of Scotland (1473–1513), who reigned 1488–1513.
With political marriages among the royal families of Europe, those lines lead to ancestors who were kings of England and France, Holy Roman Emperors, Emperors of the Byzantine Empire, princes of Kiev/Muscovy, and Viking chieftains. The ancestors include William the Conqueror, Charlemagne, King John (of Robin Hood and Magna Carta fame), King Alfred the Great, King Robert the Bruce of Scotland (“Braveheart”), Charlemagne, Atilla the Hun, and half a dozen saints. I’m descended from Duncan, who was murdered by Macbeth, and Malcolm, who overthrew Macbeth. One line goes back 53 generations to Rome around 350 A.D., to a flavius Afrius Syagrius, who served as proconsul of Africa, prefect of Rome, and consul (in 382). According to Wikipedia, he is “the earliest known ancestor of any of the royal houses of Europe.” Another goes back 58 generations to Armenia in 265.
One is Clovis, the first king of France. Legend (repeated in the novel The Da Vinci Code) claimed he was a descendant of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ :-).
Keep in mind that, except in cases of people who are related to one another marrying each other, the number of your ancestors doubles with each generation. That would mean that you could have as many as a quadrillion ancestors in 550 AD. But there were only about two hundred million people alive at that time. You might conclude that just about everybody alive today is descended from just about everybody who was alive back then. But just a few hundred years ago, most people lived in rural areas, with little travel and little contact with people in other towns, much less other countries. It was common for a family to stay in the same small geographic area for many generations (except when driven away by catastrophe, such as war, plague, and famine). That meant lots of inter-marriage, with everybody in a town being cousins to one another. (From a biological viewpoint, war, plague, and famine may have been “necessary” to change/expand the gene pool and increase the likelihood that mankind would survive). In any case, very few people can trace their ancestry back four or five generations, much less 50.
I have followed a few of the lines of descent as far back as I could trace. But literally thousands of other lines are possible. You can surf through those others by using the Wikipedia links in the following documents. At the very least, this should give you a new and personal appreciation for history. Making a breakthrough like that in tracing my ancestry on the web reminded me of the experience of Paul Atreus (“Muad-Dib”) in the novel Dune. Thanks to the effects of the “spice” and of his special genes, he suddenly senses the presence both individually and collectively of all his ancestors back for thousands of years.
You can see the document with all of the ancestors I have uncovered so far at my website https://seltzerbooks.com/gen/seltzer/seltzergenealogy.html.
The Verdict of Science
Reading A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: the Human Story Retold Through Our Genes by Adam Rutherford, I was surprised and delighted to see that the science of genetics has arrived at conclusions that I got to by way of my amateur look at my family’s ancestry.
p. 160 “…I can say with absolute confidence that if you’re vaguely of European extraction… you are descended from Charlemagne… Each generation back the number of ancestors you have doubles. 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 harbor around 137,438,953,472 individuals on it — more people than were alive then, now, or in total. What this means is that pedigrees begin to fold in on themselves a few generations back, and become less arboreal, and more a mesh or weblike. You can be, and in fact are, descended from the same individual many times over. Your Great-great-great-great-great-grandmother might hold that position in your family tree twice, or many times, as her lines of descent branch out from her, but collapse onto you. The further back through time we go, the more these lines will coalesce on fewer individuals. …
“But how can we say with utter confidence that any individual European is… directly descended from the great European conciliator?
“The answer came before high-powered DNA sequencing and ancient genetic analysis. Instead it comes from mathematics. Joseph Chang is a statistician from Yale University and wished to analyze our ancestry not with genetics or family trees, but just with numbers. By asking how recently the people of Europe would have a common ancestor, he constructed a mathematical model that incorporated the number of ancestors an individual is presumed to have had (each with two parents), and given the current population size, the point at which all those possible lines of ascent up the family trees would cross. The answer was merely 600 years ago. Sometime at the end of the thirteenth century lived a man or woman from whom all Europeans could trace ancestry, if records permitted…
“In 2013, geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop showed that DNA says exactly the same thing as Chang’s mathematical ancestry: Our family trees are not trees at all, but entangled meshes.”
NB — Clovis was an ancestor of Charlemagne. Hence, if the legend were true, everyone “vaguely of European extraction” would be a descendant of Jesus Christ. In other words, we would all have Jewish blood. :-)
