Oldest families

[Cudzoziemiec]

I am directly descended from the Duke of Wellington, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha and Piltdown Man.

[hellymedic]

Since Piltdown Man was a work of fiction, I'm not sure how much I believe the rest...

[ian]

Apropos of this and our understated relatedness to one another, I was reading about the role of GEDmatch in (inadvertently) solving criminal cases (and how it's become the go-to for law enforcement in the US). Despite a fairly modest pool of genetic data that only covers around 1% of the US population (and predominantly white, Europe-derived Americans who pay for services like 23andMe), relatedness makes it very powerful (on average any given individual has up to 300 third cousins). Basically, they exploit the innocent upload of genetic profiles (these are SNPs, not the more specific STRs used in law enforcement databases) by relatives (often distant) by building a family tree. SNPs can also reveal things like ethnicity, hard colour etc. as they can fall within genes (STRs, on the other hand, are more purely genetic markers).

[FifeingEejit]

The Spanish Armada is supposed to have brought an influx of foreign genes into Scotland as the Spanish sailors who survived married local women.

Often ending up with the unimaginative surname "Spain"


When it comes to the idea that people only traveled within a few miles of where they were born; consider the movements of the Celts and Magyars both being pushed from the East, and then the Romans who did a bit to constrain them by pushing northwards.

[TheLurker]

One of my more distant relatives decided it would be "fun" to do a family tree. I thought it was a pointless exercise because we're a long line (or rather a large web) of low lifes and ne'er do wells who've never done anything, or known anyone, worth remarking on.   Oh how I smirked when we all vanished into a haze of illegitimacy in the 1850s and 60s.  Still makes me snigger.

[Beardy]

Having a (grizzly) murderer as a second cousin, a murdered cousin (his uncle) a cousin who was a suspected dealer of suspect pharmaceuticals and a cousin whose past we don’t talk about in detail in polite company I’ve no desire to go rootling through history to find more skeletons.

[hatler]

The oldest of my cousins has done the family tree thing and determined a couple of interesting nuggets.

Our great grandfather had 13 children, .... after the age of 65, the last of which was our grandfather. And great-grandfather was born before the battle of Waterloo.

We have two women somewhere in the family (different branches) who were executed for killing their husbands. One of them might even have been burnt at the stake.

[FifeingEejit]

Others have done my families trees.
Traces back quite far into some hardly related link, 1600s

But what I really want to know is why so many of my nearer relatives have moved to the new world or australia and then moved back... I can understand the south africans all returning to Fife but...