The question was asked, "What was it like for our ancestors around the year 1000?" As a start, let's look at how many ancestors each of us had in the general vicinity of that year. The answer depends mightily on our assumptions, since we cannot know the exact number. The basic question is, how many years will there be between generations. Twenty-five is probably too few while thirty-three is probably too long. So, why don't we use the number of 30 years per generation on the average.
The year 1000 was 1,000 years ago. Therefore, there would be 33 generations from then to now. Start with yourself, the number of ancestors doubles each generation. For starters, we have:
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, etc.
After 33 generations, you would have 8,589,900,000 ancestors! That is, you would have more than eight billion ancestors! I don't think there are that many people living on the earth today. Certainly in the year 1000 there was nothing like that number of people living in western Europe. So the only way you could have eight billion ancestors then would be if many of them were doubled up and counted more than once.
Perhaps ten million people were living in all of Europe in the year 1000. Therefore, each one of them would, on the average, have to be an ancestor 860 times. Some of the people living then would not have been ancestors maybe only once, and others would have been ancestors several times more than 860.
Would your ancestors have come from one small geographic spot, or would they have been distributed over Europe? There would have been quite a bit of gene diffusion. Some of this would come from marrying the girl in the village that was three away from the one you lived in, some of this would have come from the movement of people from one area to another, and some of these distances could be quite far (the Blankenbakers moved from Austria to the Rhine River), and some of it could have come from the soldiers who were far from home.
Therefore, the question to be asked is, "What was it like to be living in Europe in the year 1000?" The answers, of course, are varied because you will have Kings and beggars for ancestors. On the average, life then was very mean and hard. Your ancestors worked hard, probably for another man, to earn their food. Probably most of your ancestors, when they "checked out", were only too happy to earn their eternal rest.
(04 May 04)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.