I must agree with Nancy. All of those of us with early ancestors are of necessity related over and over to ourselves. There were very few families, so of course they all intermarried. I have made a study of sorts--not scientific, but watching patterns, of when families moved out of their group in their marriages. The Palatines, for instance, married only other Palatines or Schnectady-Albany Dutch until about 1800 when they finally started speaking English and moved further afield--all the way to New York City! Barbara ----- Original Message ---- From: "nancyterhune@optonline.net" <nancyterhune@optonline.net> To: dutch-colonies@rootsweb.com Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2007 8:34:34 PM Subject: Re: [DUTCH-COLONIES] Tangled Roots (was: How I discovered I have Dutch ancestry) Chris: I believe that the term is "pedigree collapse." Common ancestral lines repeating; thereby collapsing lines (including the literal ones on your chart) into one another leading back to the same ancestors. No, it is not unusual -- at least not as unusual as you might think. In fact it's logical: If your ancestors were among the first Europeans to settle a geographic area, such as your Essex County NJ people (also my people), they were initially of a small pool of families. These families married into each other by necessity, and sometimes repeatedly over the early generations. Continuing geographic proximity plus familiarity through marriage created more intermarriage. Cultural alignment prolonged intermarriage among the Dutch families in this (northern NJ) area, even as they decreased to a modest minority. My own parents, married in 1955, were lineal descendants of two of the oldest families in Bergen County, NJ: Terhune and Van Blarcom. I have often said that my ancestors -- three quarters of them ended up in Bergen and Essex Counties -- had "feet of cement." Nobody went west, or in any other direction. In the patrilineal sense, I am 11th generation Bergen County, and I have many multiple descents. My pedigree is highly collapsed, with six Terhune descents, three Van Blarcom descents, nine Ackerman descents, six Bogert descents, four Van Voorhees and Van Winkle descents - and several others like this - and the Grand Prize winner: ten descents from David Demarest. Because of this (Demarest) and other repeating common ancestry, a man I work with, a Demarest, and I are related dozens of times over. My parents were related many, many times over. Distantly! :-) I am my own cousin (over and over). I joke that it is amazing there isn't more that's wrong with me. --