Alright I admit it. I’m hooked on Ancestry.com and its rivals. I have got a great deal of pleasure from tracing back our family tree (although my wife says I’m obsessed). So the point of this site is to collect some of the stories and histories I have discovered. I don’t make any claims to being an expert and, like many amateurs, I’ve relied heavily on other people on the genealogy sites who are much more expert than me and who have shared their findings online.
I’ve traced the family trees back of my side of the family, and my wife, Annette’s side. I’ve found some interesting historical characters, and ordinary people living in extraordinary times. The fact that, for instance, Llywellyn the Great, King of Wales was my 27th Great Grandfather, would be relatively common in modern times. According to this article by NBC News, you only have to go back a thousand years or so to find all Europeans are actually related. Twenty-seven generations back, in theory, we all have 134,217,728 ancestors (though in reality it’s not that many thanks to cousins marrying cousins, meaning the same people may appear several times in your family tree. Rutgers University professor Robin Fox estimates that 80 percent of historical marriages have taken place between second or closer cousins. If you’re interested in what they call ‘pedigree collapse’, you can check out this article from Family Tree Magazine.
So this is a random collection of some of those interesting genealogical rabbit holes I’ve travelled down.