In the more recent notes we have paid special attention to the male line of descent. Of course, we have other lines of descent, the majority of which are mixed male and female. I have a father and mother, two immediate ancestors. I have four grandparents and eight great-grandparents. Great-grandparents do not take us back very far. So let’s see how many ancestors we have over some of the larger stretches of time. If we go back to Charlemagne about 800 A.D., that would take us back 1200 years. If we allow 33 years per generation, that would be 36 generations.
How many positions would there be on our ancestor chart in the year 800? We would have to keep doubling the number for each generation as follows: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. until we had completed 36 doublings. This gets to be a tedious process and the exact answer is not all that important. Let us note that doubling ten times gives us 1,024, which is almost a 1,000 so let’s call it that. Therefore, we have 1,000 times 1,000 times 1,000 times 64. Each 1,000 represents doubling 2 for ten times so the three 1,000 are approximately equal to doubling 2 for thirty times. The final 64 represents doubling 2 for six times. So the answer to the original question is approximately 64,000,000,000 or 64 billion (as Americans say) ancestors.
Of the 64 billion ancestors in the year 800, only one of them in is the male line all the way.
It is interesting to compare this number to the number of people living then, say in Europe. There is no census data, so we have to estimate the number of people living then. Say we take the number of people in Europe to be ten million. With 64 billion places on your ancestry chart in the year 800, every person then would, on the average, have to occupy 64,000 places.
My point is that we have a lot of ancestors with a very mixed heritage. They may all lead back to Adam and Eve, but on the average we have many different paths. So, to emphasize any one of these is probably fallacious. As an example, if I say I am a Blankenbaker, I am ignoring millions of other people who contributed to my genetic makeup.
If it can be proved that there are sex-linked characteristics to my makeup (besides my sex), then I may have inherited these characteristics from the original "Blankenbaker". For example, a three-colored cat [a Calico cat] is a female. Having three colors is a characteristic that is inherited with the female sex genes for cats. But there few genes in the Y chromosomes, so the number of sex-linked characteristics are few, if any.
My point is that we pay too much attention to the male line.
(21 Apr 06)
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.