If you have 131,072 15 great grandparents and their children had the usual 10 children and so on down a few generations, is it any wonder that Taylor Swift and Matt Damon show up as Pottenger cousins, 13 or 14 or whatever it is. I should not have been surprised yesterday to find that someone on Roots (Bill Hader--whom I had never heard of) is a cousin. Even without going across the Atlantic, your folks come early, you are kin to millions, and not just a few millions. And not just Southerners. My surprise is how many Northerners have Pennsylvania or Maryland ancestors in common with mine. Well, the Annapolis folks were too good to keep South.
I am thinking about Walker Gilmer; forget the Gilmores, he is probably one of the Maryland Walkers like me. I should have checked earlier.
Just happened upon your blog after many years of being a fan. In terms of genealogy, I only recently started looking through the family trees on the maternal side of my male ancestors and found so many of them were also descended from 17th-century settlers even those married to the males of mi=y line into the 6th and 7th generations after settlement. Did they somehow gravitate towards each other inexorably, even into the late 19th century?
ReplyDeleteProbably they made their migrations more or less parallel and ended up at times in the same places, farther west. Some of my NC folks were near each other in the Revolution but did not intermarry for a century, in Mississippi. This happened a lot, I think.
DeleteThis seems to be generally true; I have fairly extensive colonial ancestry and I've stopped being surprised at the seemingly unlikely distant cousins I've found (one of my 5th great-grandmothers was Jemima Pottenger, daughter of Samuel Pottenger and Elizabeth Tyler, so, hi, cousin! speaking of unlikely relations).
ReplyDeleteI've found this to be generally true; most of my ancestors that I can trace arrived in the colonies in the 1600's, and I've stopped being surprised at the seemingly unlikely people I find are distant cousins (speaking of which, one of my 5th great-grandmothers is Jemima Pottenger, daughter of Samuel Pottenger and Elizabeth Tyler, so, hi, cousin!)
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