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.

Fold3 Beta Search

Fold3 sent me an invitation to review its new search capabilities.  The version is still in its Beta form.  Fold3 is a pay site that offers United States military records, some census records, and some city directories.  Among the current offerings, pension records from the Revolutionary War and the Civil War are helping me the most because of the detailed lineages required to collect a pension.  The Newark, New Jersey city directories are also fantastic.

Beta search at Fold3.
Using a soundex search for the first name Eliakem uncovered one result, whereas the original search turns up no matches.
At this time, searching for a location within a state is not useful.

Results using the currently available search engine.

The Beta search uncovered this document, a Revolutionary War Roll from 1776.
Eliakem Marsh was not on the page, though.
The "Marsh" was John Marsh.  The "Eliakem" was Eliakim Crane.

The new search results offer easier to view expanded categories, dates, and states.  I found the new format easier to navigate and sort the results.

Oprah Magazine Explores Ancestry's Free Trial

The August 2012 O, The Oprah Magazine features the article "Up A Tree" by Leslie Larson about genealogy!  I love to see our passion portrayed in a mainstream magazine.  Ms. Larson writes about her tense experience with Ancestry.com's free 14 day trial.  She sorted out a lot of the mystery behind her muddled ancestry, discovering that the stories of her inheritance did not align well with the documents she uncovered.

You can also sign up for a free trial.  As a tip, make sure that your schedule for those 14 days is relatively free of other commitments.  Every clue leads to more clues and the possibilities multiply exponentially.  You can easily spend hours and then days pursuing these avenues, forgoing sleep and non-essential activities, as detailed in the article.  Some have written to me that they are put-off by the requirement of a credit card for the free trial.  I have not heard any complaints that Ancestry charged people an unwanted subscription fee.  I think that it is silly to require a credit card for the free trial.  Ancestry can easily cut you off after 14 days and then ask for a credit card to continue.  You can maintain a free membership to Ancestry and access the free databases and indexes, but your ability to research will be very limited.  The larger libraries subscribe to Ancestry, so you may continue your research there, but you should not wear your pajamas in public.