Descended from the rich and famous?
The brotherhood of man is an inescapable fact.
from the July 3, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 2
Does it really matter if your ancestors came over on the Mayflower and mine were probably cattle thieves?
Genealogy is a huge business in the United States, and some estimates have it at the billion dollar mark. There's a fascination to see whether we're descended from the rich and famous, and there are lots of companies that sell research tools to help people trace their ancestry.
I was interested for years in proving whether the family legend about being descended from a Cherokee princess was true, but I got lost in the confusing thicket of marriages and offspring.
So my attention was arrested by a recent article in the Smithsonian Magazine ("The Family Tree, Pruned," July) by a splendid writer, Richard Conniff. Genealogy, in his view, is fascinating, but ultimately meaningless.
Wait a minute, I thought. What about my grandfather who came to the United States at 14, all alone and not speaking a word of English? And what about that Cherokee princess? "Conjuring up a family tree and figuring out where we sit in it gives us back a sense of place, of connectedness," says Conniff. He points out, though, that going back 10 generations, to about 1700 – when that Cherokee princess would have been living – would give me in theory 1,000 other direct ancestors, and going back another 10, the number swells to a million.
He notes that because of intermarriage and the difficulty of travel, when one traces back about 5,000 years, "all our ancestors are the same." Rich and famous or an unknown peasant; slave or Nobel winning laureate; of African, Asian, or Caucasian descent, at one point we find we all have an identical genealogy.
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