They're not heavy, they're my cousins

We looked the last couple of times at the fella, Samuel F.B. Morse, who's credited with the invention of the telegraph and how that leap in communication came about. We looked at Morse because he's listed as one of Sharon's ancestors in Family Search, although he's a distant cousin.

I'm reading a book about another famous invention and the men behind it, and I wondered whether I could find a putative relationship with them as well. I won't mention the invention or the inventors here because they're not really the point of this post, but I found that Sharon is (probably) related to them in another one of those distant-cousin ways -- something like a seventh cousin four times removed. 

Over the months and years I've been delving into history through the gimmick of our family tree, I've managed to run across a number of distant relations who are either involved in significant events in American and British history or who are famous enough for most people to have heard of them.

Now to emphasize, I'm not doing this sifting through the tree just to find those people. Instead I'm trying to remind myself about and broaden my understanding of history. But if my point were simply to brag about the people we are possibly or probably related to, I would have still found enough information to have written these missives for several months. 

These discoveries have prompted me to wonder about the likelihood whether any of us would be able to find the famous and near famous with a modicum of digging and beyond that how likely we'd be to discover that we share some relationship with each other. 

The answer is: pretty darn likely.

One of the questions I asked myself is whether I might be somehow related to my wife. I had done a search for a famous person whose life span overlapped ours because I know Sharon's half of the family has wondered whether they're related to him. My initial effort found that I was related to the man's wife. I tried another method of searching and found that, sure enough, her family does indeed have a distant-cousin relationship with the man. 

Now that means that we are both distantly related to the couple's children, the older of whom is the same age we are, which I suppose would mean that Sharon and I are also distant cousins through the x-times removed part of the cousin relationship.

We need to remember one thing as we moved forward: Genealogical relations and genetic relations are different. In other words, you may be related to someone through the processes of marriage and child bearing, but share very few genes. So if intelligence is an inherited trait, Sharon's smarts likely come from some other source than the famous inventors in her tree.

An article in Scientific American, Humans are More Closely Related Than We Commonly Think, notes that whoever you are if you go back 33 generations and counted all the people in your family tree, you would find you were related to about 8 billion people. That assumes that everyone in the tree is a different person. 

Of course this would be more people that would have been alive then, which means not all the slots in your genealogical past are filled with unique individuals. People die or divorce then remarry. We haven't always had rules about how closely related you have to be to marry someone, and still don't have the same rules in every country or jurisdiction. Et voila, we are all related if you go back far enough. 

The article points to a set of mathematical and simulations done at MIT in 2004 showed that our most recent common ancestor lived somewhere between 55 CE and 1,400 BCE. That's for one common ancestor. How about every ancestor? The fancy term geneticists use is genetic isopoint, where if "you were alive at the time, then you are the ancestor of everyone alive today or no one alive today." Geneticists reckon that point falls somewhere between 5,300-2,200 BCE. 

Now if your ancestry stems from European stock, your genetic isopoint lies about 1,000 CE. Because this isopoint is so recent the takeaway is "No person has forebears from just one ethnic background or region of the world. And your genealogical connection to the entire globe means that not too long ago your ancestors were involved in every event in world history."

So yeah, we are all probably related to someone famous. And I hate to give you the bad news, you are probably related to ... me. Sorry to break it to you, cuz.