Nevertheless, with the Outlaw / King playing on Netflix it is interesting to check Geni to see my father linked to the Bruce as 19th great grandson. What's funny is that the link is through the McGehees. The DNA really does show that the 17th century immigrant to Virginia was really a MacGregor, bearer of an outlawed name. Then my mother appears as 2nd cousin 20 times removed through Frank Bell and his father Robert Knox Bell. The thing is, there are probably 12 different ways any Scot descends from Robert the Bruce. It's not that big a deal, except that it adds a frisson to the line flashed on the screen at the end about 300 years later his descendant taking the throne of England too. Not that he was a very nice cousin . . . .
But for fun I checked the Bruce's immediate descendants and ran grandson John Glen against my Parker astronaut cousin thinking I might see a continuous Glenn run but oh, no, off into other names. So it's another connection. There are so many roundabout connections, so many ways of getting to kinship, that we have to remember that having Robert Ewart for a grandfather twice is the top of the barrel of duplicate ancestries. The other side of this is that if you are going to have a man as your grandfather twice, how nice to have him be a Committee of Safety man.
And when I started this checking 15 years ago I realized that anyone whose white folks came in the 1600s as many of my father's did and whose other white folks all came before the Revolution--well anyone will have not thousands of American cousins but millions. You look at the men at the Alamo and Gonzales and see that none of them could have had any idea that how they were kin, except for immediate family.
And then you realize that in the years I have been checking the figures have changed. If there were several millions early in the 2000s when James Keith Head explained that we were double cousins (double cousin plus, really) the number of millions has--what? doubled?
Anyhow, it's not a great movie, but I have never seen such a battle on the screen. And it was not even Brannockburn.
But for fun I checked the Bruce's immediate descendants and ran grandson John Glen against my Parker astronaut cousin thinking I might see a continuous Glenn run but oh, no, off into other names. So it's another connection. There are so many roundabout connections, so many ways of getting to kinship, that we have to remember that having Robert Ewart for a grandfather twice is the top of the barrel of duplicate ancestries. The other side of this is that if you are going to have a man as your grandfather twice, how nice to have him be a Committee of Safety man.
And when I started this checking 15 years ago I realized that anyone whose white folks came in the 1600s as many of my father's did and whose other white folks all came before the Revolution--well anyone will have not thousands of American cousins but millions. You look at the men at the Alamo and Gonzales and see that none of them could have had any idea that how they were kin, except for immediate family.
And then you realize that in the years I have been checking the figures have changed. If there were several millions early in the 2000s when James Keith Head explained that we were double cousins (double cousin plus, really) the number of millions has--what? doubled?
Anyhow, it's not a great movie, but I have never seen such a battle on the screen. And it was not even Brannockburn.
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