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Richard Jernigan -> RE: Andalucian guitars (Jul. 19 2013 17:40:03)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: estebanana
But which one are you related to Richard?
* ducks and runs*
[:D]
One of my old cousins once told me, rather breathlessly, that one of the Queen of England's 15-times-great-grandmothers was a Jernigan. I didn't have the heart to tell her that it was, statistically speaking, nearly guaranteed to happen.
By the time you get back to your 15-times-great-grandmother, your family tree has 131,072 branches, half of them women. In the European aristocracy 17 generations ago, there were no more than a few hundred women of marrying age. So any one of them chosen at random almost certainly occupies several branches of the Queen's family tree.
On paper, that is. Over that span of time, it's highly unlikely that the paperwork reflects what actually went on between the sheets.
When I told an English friend, who knew his ancestry only back to his great-grandparents, that there was a society in the USA that you could belong to only if you could prove you were descended from a signer of Magna Carta, he exclaimed, "But everybody in England is descended from someone who signed Magna Carta!"
I agreed.
When my kids showed a slight interest in the subject, I told them that the only virtue I could see in knowing a long family history, was it showed that, over a long enough period of time, almost every human character trait will emerge, for good or ill.
I've finally gotten around to starting on Robert Caro's multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. I'm loving it. Caro did an amazing amount of research, going back to Lyndon's great-grandparents, giving a character sketch of each. At one point Caro comments, concerning both Lyndon's ancestors and Caro's sources of information, "They were ranch people, focused on breeding."
But all I have to do is to reflect on the very, very different personalities of my two children, only 14 months apart in age.
RNJ
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