Blog Some Genealogy

John Henry Daughtry and his wife, the former Mary Frances Ballard, of Sugar Hollow, Virginia.

StraightDope.com reports:

If you go back far enough, however, pedigree collapse happens to everybody. Think of your personal family tree as a diamond-shaped array imposed on the ever-spreading fan of human generations. (I told you this was cosmic.) As you trace your pedigree back, the number of ancestors in each generation increases steadily up to a point, then slows, stops, and finally collapses. Go back far enough and no doubt you would find that you and all your ancestors were descended from the first human tribe in some remote Mesopotamian village. Or, if you like, from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

These simple facts have given rise to some remarkable displays of statistical pyrotechnics. Demographer Kenneth Wachtel estimates that the typical English child born in 1947 would have had around 60,000 theoretical ancestors at the time of the discovery of America. Of this number, 95 percent would have been different individuals and 5 percent duplicates. (Sounds like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but you know what I mean.) Twenty generations back the kid would have 600,000 ancestors, one-third of which would be duplicates. At the time of the Black Death, he’d have had 3.5 million–30 percent real, 70 percent duplicates. The maximum number of “real” ancestors occurs around 1200 AD–2 million, some 80 percent of the population of England.

Are You Related to Yourself?

WANTED: A Peyton Teenager to Accept a Full scholarship.

Brighton College in England has been searching since 2002, for a 13 to 18-year-old boy or girl to accept a scholarship. Former pupil, Derek Wakehurst Peyton, left a bequest to his Alma Mater to cover the education of a child with his same surname of “Peyton”. Since then the school has been unable to find a Peyton, even though they have contacted all 600 Peytons in UK telephone books. Headmaster Richard Cairns, who is now using internet search engines to spread the net wider throughout the Anglosphere said: “I think it is a terrible shame that we have the money available to fund a child through this wonderful school but we seem to be at a loss to find ourselves a Peyton.” Mr. Cairns described the scholarship as covering all costs apart from extras, such as trips abroad and additional music lessons.

In Vermont, surviving spouse, Ichabod, spoke of his “amiable consort”:
“Yet never let our hearts divide
Nor death dissolve the chain
for love & joy were once allayd
and must be joind again”

The image, AmiableConsort, was originally uploaded by Zzzzt!Zzzzt!. It is posted here from

More Images of Gravestones