Your Family: Past, Present, and Future

shanew

interesting read about the numbers and timeline of people in your tree - going back with pedigree collapse, and also in the future.

Your Family: Past, Present, and Future (waitbutwhy.com)

Coolnabacky1873

Good read!

That's why I get a pain in my face when I hear people saying they are descendant from royalty...yawn.

On Twitter, Geni is always retweeting people who say they are "fourteenth cousin sixty times removed from Philip Seymour Hoffman" (apparently RIP as of earlier, btw), Aren't we all.

Ipso

I'd say the pedigree, or lack there of, would collapse very quickly in very rural areas. I wonder how the fact some people never have children factors into things.

pinkypinky

Having done some work on a minor landed gentry/aristocracy family, I've seen this collapse in practice. It's really common - people wanted to marry within their own religion and social class. 2 great examples, which I may or may not have mentioned before. Names changed to protect anonymity.

Simon m. Maria and had one son, Tim.
Maria died and Simon remarried to Helena and had Michael, and several more children.
By chance, Maria and Helena are first cousins.

Later, Michael and Tim, half brothers, and second cousins, both married. Tim had a daughter, Suzanne and Michael had a son, Richard.

Later still, Richard and Susan get married. They are half-cousins as well as third cousins through their grandmothers.

Example two saw the sister of a direct ancestor later on become a direct ancestor herself when one of her great-great grandchildren married the great-great grandchild of her brother.

Ipso

The Habsburgs family tree is an extreme example, to say the least.
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/04/14/inbreeding-the-downfall-of-the/

pedroeibar1

Pinky,
I don’t envy you having to plot that tree on paper! I read your post over a coffee this afternoon, and over a glass of wine this evening and it still gets no easier!

Tree collapse is very common in landed gentry families. What I have noticed in particular in the collateral branch of my own family is that the majority of several close-cousin marriages were childless; the few with children saw them dying young or just had one child that had no issue – I’ve no idea if this was because of infertility or a desire to avoid idiocy, but I suspect the former as many date to the 1700’s. The senior line in my collateral branch died out as a result in the 1700’s. However, the sole daughter of the last of that line married and kept her maiden name, hyphenating it before her married name so that my family name continues in its hyphenated form with her descent.

In a Munster landed gentry tree I’m working on at the moment (not mine) I’ve encountered another genealogical oddity:
A. B. was a wealthy bachelor. In his will of 17xx he left substantial bequests to his nephews. As a result of this ‘largesse’ two of his nephews (brother-in-law C.D.’s sons), ED and FD, who had received large tracts of land added B to their name as a mark of respect, double barrelling it to ‘E.B-D’ and ‘F.B-D’. For the same reason their uncle G.D.’s eldest son H.D. changed his name completely and became H. B. To add to the genealogical confusion, HB’s first wife was also a B (cousin, dsp) and his second wife was a K, an heiress, and their son WB later changed his surname to K in accordance with the will of his maternal grandfather. As a result three male generations had different surnames - D (grandfather), B (father) and K (son).

Menas

Reminds me of.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7x1ETPkZsk

.BrianJM

pinkypinky wrote: »

Having done some work on a minor landed gentry/aristocracy family, I've seen this collapse in practice. It's really common - people wanted to marry within their own religion and social class. 2 great examples, which I may or may not have mentioned before. Names changed to protect anonymity.

Simon m. Maria and had one son, Tim.
Maria died and Simon remarried to Helena and had Michael, and several more children.
By chance, Maria and Helena are first cousins.

Later, Michael and Tim, half brothers, and second cousins, both married. Tim had a daughter, Suzanne and Michael had a son, Richard.

Later still, Richard and Susan get married. They are half-cousins as well as third cousins through their grandmothers.

Example two saw the sister of a direct ancestor later on become a direct ancestor herself when one of her great-great grandchildren married the great-great grandchild of her brother.

Mmmm...
I know what you're saying but I'll have to put it on paper to visualise it properly.
The family tree programs I've tried would probably say 'you can't do that'!

L1011

You know you're hitting something interesting when you break the rendering on ancestry... My g-grandfather married someone who died in childbirth, then married her cousin. His sister married another cousin. When you add in his THIRD wife it becomes an unreadable mess of lines that it doesn't even try to do usually.

Coincidentally neither the child from the tragic childbirth or the sister had children which reduces the number of surreal uncle-cousins I had.

Jellybaby1

Ah, the tapestry that is life!