My Ancestors

Today I have added a page to the site on some musings on some of the mathematics of family history.

ChatGPT tells me I’ve looked at…

The mathematical complexity of tracing ancestry, highlighting that if considering the simple series of multiplying parents, we would theoretically have over a billion ancestors 30 generations back – an impossibility considering global population. The author suggests this can be explained by duplicated ancestors due to intermarriages among relatives, especially in pre-industrial revolution times, but that a corollary of this is that we are all much more inter-connected than we might think, and that we’re also all connected to royalty.

Then, considering number of offspring per couple, the author presents equations to estimate number of individuals and cousins per generation, illustrating the concept with scenarios from personal family history and suggests a Fecundicity Index that could be applied to different branches of the family.

Let me know your views via the comments section on the page.

Thanks