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Shaking Your Family Tree

August 19, 1999
	Dozens of Cousins by Myra Vanderpool Gormley, C.G.
Genealogy is America's latest obsession, according to Time Magazine, and indeed so it seems. Genealogy has exploded on the Internet as millions curious about their relatives and ancestors try to track down information. When people are looking into their pasts, chances are if they climb to the outer branches of their family trees they can discover just about any type of heritage, be it cowboys and pirates, scholars and artists, or even royalty and presidents. While there are numerous books on how to do genealogy, for some fun summer reading, check out Dozens of Cousins: Blue Genes, Horse Thieves, and Other Relative Surprises in Your Family Tree, by Lois Horowitz (Ten Speed Press). Dozens of Cousins offers helpful suggestions on how to make an exciting hobby or research project out of creating a family tree. The author weaves in personal anecdotes from people of all backgrounds on the surprises and enrichment their quests to learn more about family history brought them. Packed with fun family tree trivia, and interesting tidbits, the book wittily makes light of such astonishing and potentially baffling topics as: -- Calculation confusion: If each of us traced our lineage back to the time of Christ, we would each have 779 billion distant grandparents on our family tree. The problem is 779 billion is much more than the number of people estimated ever to have lived. In pure numbers, the number of potential spaces on our family trees is equal to this huge number, but in reality, the number of unique individuals who occupy those spaces is far less. Most, if not all, of us and our kin occupy duplicate spaces on our family trees. The reason is that many of our ancestors married their cousins and other close kin. As a result, the same people are counted more than once on a family tree. -- Genealogical bottlenecks: When this occurs, the number of distant grandparents in a founding generation of couples never increases no matter how many generations pass. Example: About 102 people came on the Mayflower in 1620. After several generations of intermarriage among their descendants, the original founders who had children all came together posthumously on the same family tree. An estimated 20 to 30 million Americans today are said to descend from the original Mayflower families. This means that a full 10 percent of the population are related to each other by marriage or blood from that one bottleneck alone. -- Lost relatives: Unbeknownst to them, Presidents Bush, Garfield, Hoover and Ford all descended from the 17th century couple, John Wheeler and Agnes Yeomans, of Newbury, Mass. -- We are lucky if we can identify 10 or 15 generations of our family -- three to five is more typical. Recorded history, the means to find out about our families, began only 5,000 years ago in its most elementary form and about 500 years ago in a more developed form. The book offers creative suggestions, comments and amusing family myths for those intrepid folks intent on finding more family. Horowitz, a librarian for the San Diego Public Library, has written four books on research methods and genealogy. Dozens of Cousins is available at bookstores for about $9.95. (c) 1999, Los Angeles Times Syndicate Myra Vanderpool Gormley and Julie Case are co-editors of Missing Links, a free weekly genealogy e-zine. To subscribe, send your request to: Missing Links Newsletter Return to Myra Vanderpool Gormley Main Page Return to Columns Main Page
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