Uncovering a Productive Paper Trail

William Walling of Keyport, Monmouth County, New Jersey died 31 July 1870.  An obituary provided an interesting tidbit that he was "the largest property holder at Keyport."

Trenton State Gazette
9 August 1870
GenealogyBank.com

Now that New Jersey probate records are readily accessed online, I have a lot of work ahead of me, sorting through his estate transactions, which took over 26 years to finalize.



Monmouth County, New Jersey
Surrogate's Proceedings Index

Also of interest was a newspaper article run just four days before William Walling died.  He was physically digging a well as he constructed a store on the corner of Broad and Front streets.

Trenton State Gazette, Trenton, New Jersey
27 July 1870
GenealogyBank.com

Wondering if the building was completed and if it still stood, I again wandered online and found the structure, called Walling Hall at some point, now housing McDonagh's Pub at 2 West Front Street, Keyport.

Keyport Online
"Village History"
Walling Hall

William Walling appears to have left behind quite a paper trail for us to follow . . .

Prolific and Redundant

In researching the query posed in a previous blog post, "Royal Genealogy," what are the chances that people of today are descended from Charlemagne?  Quite good, it seems.

"Ancestry and Mathematics" is a very interesting article by Bruce Railsback and on point for the Charlemagne discussion.  Every time you travel back in your family tree, your ancestors double.  You have two parents, four great grandparents, eight great great grandparents, and so on.  Go back ten generations and you have 1,024 ancestors.  Go back twenty generations and you have over one million ancestors.  Go back thirty generations and you have over one billion ancestors.  The problem (aside from not being able to document so many people so far back in time) is that there were not that many people alive on the planet way back when.  The population of the planet did not reach one billion until around the year 1800 A.D.

So how can you have more ancestors than the population of the planet?  Many of your ancestors from different lines were the same people.  You are your own cousin.

What does this have to do with Charlemagne?  He lived about 1200 years ago.  If you use a conservative four generations per century, that's about 48 generations ago, when you should have billions of ancestors.  There were only about 300 million people on the planet at this time, though, which includes children and people who did not leave any descendants.  Charlemagne was one of those 300 million and he did leave descendants, so it is entirely possible that you are descended from Charlemagne.

Could this be why I have so many "genetic cousins" with no apparent connections when comparing family trees for a few hundred years?  If not Charlemagne, maybe another prolific ancestor?  I will keep this theme in mind for a future blog post.