Judge Gorsuch is a direct descendant of
Charles Gorsuch
Birth 1687 Baltimore Co MD
Death 1747
whose children were baptized at St Paul Episcopal Church in Baltimore.
and
Rev. John Gorsuch
Birth 1609 Hertfordshire England
Death 1647 Hertfordshire England
and
Adam de Scarisbrick, Lord of Gorsuch
Birth 1460 • England
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When you go back to someone born in 1460, that’s approximately 16 generations back. Assuming that Adam de Scarisbrick, Lord of Gorsuch was Neil Gorsuch’s 13-great-grandfather, he was one of 65,536 ancestors from that generation for Neil Gorsuch. His other 65,535 13-great-grandparents contributed just as much to his generic make-up, but locating them and adding them to his family tree is a lot more difficult.
If you go back twenty generations (to persons born circa the early 1300s), you would find over a million 17-great-grandparents (although chances are that a lot of those names would appear multiple times in ones tree). Thirty generations back (around the late 900s), you would find over one *billion* 27-great-grandparents, which is many times larger than the world’s population at the time; many of ones ancestors from that generation appear hundreds or sometimes thousands of times in ones tree.
We know with mathematical certainty that we are all related to everyone else on Earth, although obviously some more remotely than others. Certainly everyone with even partial European ancestry is a descendant of Charlemagne (who died in 814) .... and of that butcher in Krakow with the five children, and of that seamstress in Cardiff who died at childbirth but whose daughter had four children. Everyone who lived in the 8th and 9th centuries in Europe either is an ancestor of *everyone* of European descent that is alive today, or of no one at all (because their line died out soon after their own death).
But the fact that we all have the same ancestors does not make genealogy any less fun—on the contrary, it makes the challenge greater, and allows us to build upon others’ research. While just about everyone in America is a descendant of Charlemagne, the challenge of genealogy is to prove it (but good luck trying to prove descent from an 8th-century butcher in Krakow; records for commoners is a lot more difficult to come by). I have to say, it is an extremely rewarding hobby.