MORE LARGE NUMBERS.
*[Vergiss deine Tasche nicht!]
In the last note I was emphasizing the vast number of ancestors that one has. We saw that your chart of your ancestors would need about four trillion places for names at the time of Charlemagne. Even if the data were available to you, you could not fill in all the blanks in your lifetime.
Let’s reverse the process and ask the question, “How many descendants does Charlemagne have?” We will have to make some assumptions to arrive at an approximation. We will assume that, on the average, each descendant has two in the next generation below. It doesn’t matter whether they are male or female. As we did in the previous discussion, we will assume there are three and one-half generations per Century so that again there will be forty-two generations in the twelve Centuries. These numbers are very fortunate because they lead to the same answer as we had before, namely, there will be four trillion descendants of Charlemagne (this is an excessive number in that some of these descendants are duplicated). Still, to claim that you are a descendant of Charlemagne hardly puts you in an exclusive club. A very large fraction of the people who have European ancestry have some of their genes from Charlemagne. [But proving it is another matter altogether! GWD]
By now, it may be the case that none of your genes came from Charlemagne even if you are a descendant just because your gene pool originates from so many different people. One half of your genes came from your father and one half came from your mother. One quarter came from each of your grandparents. The further back you go, the more diluted the contribution of any one individual becomes. We were saying that maybe ten million people were living in Europe in the year 800 so the contribution of any one individual from that time is extremely diluted, perhaps non-existent.
*[Don’t forget your bag!]
(25 Apr 07)
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.