Bet they still can't find my Catherine Stace's birth and marriage to Richard Hawkes! Audrey ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Barton" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2006 11:17 PM Subject: [OEL] Genealogy > When we hear someone remark with pride that they are descended from, say, > Henry VIII, the appropriate response should be laughter. For whites at > least, it would be very unusual NOT to have an enormous array of royalty > and Barons, Bishops, etc in the direct ancestry. The only difficulty is > finding a path to them among so many other paths. > To take an example, (genealogy being a hobby I sometimes dabble in) - I > located on net a reliable sourced, very large, tree which contained my > wife's 12th greatgrandmother (Ursula Tyndale, bn 1510). From her, it was > comparatively easy to establish that her (my wife's) first cousin 28 times > removed was Macbeth, who killed her 26th great grandfather, Duncan I King > of Scotland, in battle (not in bed, as Shakespeare fictionalised the > story) in 1040. > Such 'finds' are rather like being surprised that a monkey, tapping at > random on a typewriter forever, should type out a Shakespeare sonnet. When > you see the rest of what it typed, you are not at all surprised. > Theoretically, we each have around 268 million direct ancestors alive in > 1100 AD, and 536 million from then till now. Whereas the world population > in 1100 was about 300 million. Not only do we share each others' > ancestors, we share our own. It is quite usual that a set of parents may > appear in a tree in say the 20th and 24th generation. Large royal families > and plural marriages add to the likelihood. The rate at which large, > well-researched trees are being added to "Rootsweb","Ancestry World Tree", > "One World Tree" etc, and "Genes United" and DNB based sites, is ushering > in an age of freely available genealogy very fast. > > John Barton > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the > quotes in the subject and the body of the message > > > -- > No virus found in this incoming message. > Checked by AVG Free Edition. > Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.12.5/451 - Release Date: 19/09/2006 > >