You DON'T Descend From All Your Ancestors [12:45]

YouTube ^ | July 17, 2024 | Marcus Gallo

[SunkenCiv]

This video explains the difference between genetic and genealogical descent, showing why most of our genetic ancestry is lost over a short number of generations.

You DON'T Descend From All Your Ancestors | 12:45
Marcus Gallo | 16.9K subscribers | 795,071 views | July 17, 2024

[SunkenCiv]

The founding members of Rush were guitarist Alex Lifeson (born Aleksandar Živojinović), drummer John Rutsey, and bassist Jeff Jones. The only surviving (last I checked) member of Badfinger is guitarist Joey M, who was brought in after the band was signed to Apple. The Eagles are now The Eagle, since only the drummer Don Henley remains of the founding members (Leadon’s alive, the other two dead).

[Jamestown1630]

My aunt was a genealogist, professionally and for her DAR chapter. She was a snob, but also very honest about her work. People would get mad if she found that their ‘true’ ancestor, according to actual records in old churches, graveyards, etc., was some common menial laborer instead of the fancy person they had assumed...

[Jamestown1630]

It’s a fascinating hobby, and gives one a great appreciation for history.

But you can never be sure all the documentation represents the truth.

[SunkenCiv]

Right-oh.

[SunkenCiv]

Years ago I read about a late-19th c defrocked monk (this is another story from Failing Memory Lane, btw) who took to doing family trees. There was a big uptick in interest at that time, a lot of the surname books were done circa 1890.

Anyway, to satisfy his customer, he invented a king of France, and continued to add invented children of of the imaginary ruler, none of whom succeeded their father. In the mid- to late- 20th century, people are still discovering that scam as they retrace the family tree inherited from some earlier relative of theirs. :^)

When our local library had free access to much of the Ancestry resources, I found and read the application stuff filled out by a known cousin (I never met her, and she lived in a more easterly state) to join the DAR, about a hundred years ago. My info matched hers, so that was cool, I didn’t know she’d done that.

Running into a posh ancestor wasn’t something I expected, I figured my modest research would eventually run out of archival records for each line, and about the only thing I’d ever know about these was some or most of their vital info, because we’ve been from the po’ side of town since before there was a town.

When it happened, wowee. But again, just because they’ve got a written pedigree (not to mention references and info in dusty old history books) doesn’t mean they weren’t crawling all over everything that moved. :^)

[mairdie]

People born in the south have a much higher chance of having a royal ancestry as people with royal connections settled there more than in the north.

[Cloverfarm]

It’s true that we have thousands of ancestors.

But I’m curious and look at time frames, when they were born, where they went, where they are buried, how many kids they had and am amazed that some of them survived.For instance, one ancestor born on a sailing ship coming over from Ireland. Amazing that mom and baby survived.

So for me it’s human interest stories and a connection to history.

[mairdie]

There’s another thing that we inherit, and that’s personality traits. I was raised at a time when U of Chicago was pushing the nurture, not nature. They wanted traits to be defined by environment so that they could plan how to modify people’s personalities. So a lot of the research into nature affecting people went down the tube.

I was raised by a family that was risk adverse. I scared them to dickens and always wondered how this cuckoo ended up in that nest. Once I got into genealogy, I kept finding ancestors with whom I shared far more personality traits than the gentle and wonderful immediate family that raised me.

So I’m a big believer that some genes do survive the winnowing out of the vast numbers of our ancestors to affect who we are today.

[ifinnegan]

Yeah. It’s fun.

DNA analysis supplements and complements the genealogical records well.

[mairdie]

Hope for some Massachusetts ancestors. They were fervid record keepers and published town books from earliest times to 1850, then distributed all the books into all the libraries. I’ve actually xeroxed original wills out of the 1600s from town halls that are reproduced in the books.

Rhode Island was a pain in the butt. They published a lot, then just started adding supplementals that meant you had to look everywhere through lots of different books. Painful.

New York was the pits. They had minimal information in individual town halls so you had to be prepared to travel extensively and visit all the churches they might have attended while you were at it. New York takes most of my research time and even then I feel like I’m getting the minimal.

Oh, cemeteries. The records of burials is a big help there. When they aren’t digging up the graves to extend the church or put in a highway. It was explained to me that they dig until the earth changes color, then pile all the dirt into a new casket. One church in Kingston just put up the old gravestones and ignored what used to be under them.

[Dr. Franklin]

People born in the south have a much higher chance of having a royal ancestry as people with royal connections settled there more than in the north.

And Georgia was a Royal penal colony before Australia. Consider that too if you're a Southerner.

[mairdie]

Must admit that DNA makes my eyes cross. I control the DNA for myself, my brother, a cousin on my grandmother’s side and an illegitimate daughter of the family that my illegitimate grandmother was SUPPOSED to be related to. Most of my time spent looking at it just confuses me completely.

[mairdie]

Don’t they also have a higher percentage of Mayflower ancestors?

[SunkenCiv]

Transcript
0:00	·	You don't descend genetically from all your ancestors.
0:02	·	The human genome is made
0:04	·	up of more than 3 billion base pairs, the nucleic acids that bind to one another to form the double
0:08	·	helix structure of DNA. There are only four types of base pairs: adenine always pairs with thymine
0:14	·	and cytosine always pairs with guanine.
0:17	·	Now, you might imagine that 3 billion base pairs is a very large number. And you'd be right. But
0:22	·	remember that the number of your ancestors doubles every generation. We only need to go back 32
0:27	·	generations, to roughly 1200 AD, before each of us has over 4 billion 30th-great-grandparents.
0:34	·	If we were to descend equally from all of our ancestors, we would reach a hard limit around
0:39	·	this time. With more ancestors than units of DNA, we simply could not descend from everyone.
0:45	·	Having said this, one might imagine that it is
0:48	·	irrelevant how many theoretical ancestors a person had 32 generations ago. Due to cousin marriage,
0:54	·	many of the same people appear in different places in our family tree, so we would have far fewer
1:00	·	actual ancestors than base pairs of DNA. In fact, it would not be possible to have 4 billion
1:06	·	ancestors living in 1200 AD -- we now estimate that only 450 million people lived on the planet
1:11	·	at that time. Even if a person living today managed to be descended from all of them, this is
1:17	·	a far smaller number than the limit of 3 billion base pairs. We could say the same thing about
1:22	·	earlier human populations: no matter how far we go back in time, there would be fewer people living
1:28	·	on the planet than there are base pairs in our genomes. Those individual ancestors would appear
1:33	·	over and over again in our ancestry, distributed over many different parts of our family trees.
1:40	·	Therefore, we should still be able to get genetic material from all of those ancestors.
1:44	·	But this is not how human descent
1:47	·	works. We do not descend equally from all of our ancestors, as David Reich explains in his book,
1:53	·	Who We Are and How We Got Here.
1:56	·	Each of us gets 23 chromosomes from our fathers and 23 from our mothers, arranged in pairs.
2:01	·	Two chromosomes determine sex. Men
2:04	·	receive an X chromosome from their mothers, but a Y chromosome from their fathers. Because of this,
2:09	·	we can trace a man's direct paternal ancestor (his father's father's father, going back millennia),
2:15	·	by looking at his Y chromosome.
2:18	·	It's impossible to use this method to trace a woman's direct maternal ancestor (her mother's
2:23	·	mother's mother, going back millennia), because women receive X chromosomes from both parents.
2:30	·	However, we only receive mitochondrial DNA from our mothers. We can therefore trace
2:35	·	anyone's direct maternal ancestor by looking at mitochondrial DNA.
2:39	·	As a result,
2:40	·	each of us is born with 47 distinct pieces of DNA: 23 chromosomes from each parent, and 1 complete
2:47	·	set of mitochondrial DNA from our mothers.
2:51	·	But we do not transmit those chromosomes fully intact to the next generation. Instead,
2:56	·	during meiosis, the pairs of chromosomes are interspliced. When a man forms a sperm, he creates
3:02	·	a set of 23 chromosomes that has an average of 26 splices. Any chromosome in a typical sperm
3:08	·	will therefore have about half of its DNA from the man's father and half from the man's mother. When
3:14	·	a woman forms an egg, she creates an average of 45 splices. So the chromosomes in eggs will be split
3:20	·	so that roughly one third comes from one of her parents and two-thirds come from the other parent.
3:26	·	Unlike a man's intact Y chromosome, the crossover of genes affects all of a woman's chromosomes,
3:32	·	including her X chromosomes, so that the X chromosomes she passes to her children mix the
3:37	·	DNA from both of her own parents' X chromosomes.
3:41	·	In every generation, these splits take place at different spots on the genome, and there
3:45	·	are different numbers of splits that form each time. But on average, every generation adds 71
3:51	·	more splices than the generation before. Knowing this allows genetic researchers to estimate the
3:57	·	familial relatedness of two people by looking at their genomes: if they share identical sections
4:02	·	of DNA, the longer those sections are, the closer in time they are related. This is because there
4:08	·	have been fewer random splicing events that have disrupted the shared stretches of DNA.
4:13	·	This also creates a fascinating genetic lottery:
4:17	·	as generations advance, some ancestors will contribute disproportionately to a descendant's
4:22	·	DNA, and some will contribute nothing at all.
4:26	·	Why? Each generation, the number of DNA stretches only grows by 71 while the number of ancestors
4:33	·	doubles. In other words, the units of genetic descent increase arithmetically, but the units of
4:39	·	genealogical descent increase exponentially.
4:43	·	So, for example, 3 generations back, you have 8 great-grandparents, whose genetic contribution
4:49	·	will be divided into 260 pieces. On average, each will contribute about 5 or 6 chromosomes' worth of
4:56	·	DNA in 32 large stretches.
4:59	·	Nine generations back, say around the year 1800, you have 512 ancestors, whose genetic contribution
5:06	·	will be divided into 686 pieces. Although you still have more genetic slots than you
5:11	·	have ancestors, some of these ancestors will have passed none of their genes on to you,
5:16	·	and some will have multiple stretches of DNA that they gave to you completely
5:20	·	intact. At this point, only 72 percent of these 7th-great-grandparents will give you some of your
5:26	·	genetics.
5:28	·	It only takes a short time for the number of your genealogical ancestors to dwarf the number
5:32	·	of your genetic ancestors. Fifteen generations back, say around the year 1650, when the first
5:39	·	English colonies began to be founded in North America, you have 32,768 genealogical ancestors,
5:46	·	but only 1,112 genetic ancestors. Over less than 400 years, 97 percent of your ancestors contribute
5:55	·	nothing to your genetics.
5:58	·	The same is true in the reverse direction. If you have living descendants in 400 years,
6:03	·	you have only a 3 percent chance of contributing anything at all to their genome, unless you are
6:07	·	lucky enough to be s omeone's direct maternal or paternal ancestor. Soon, any contributions you
6:14	·	do make will appear in slivers of DNA so tiny that it becomes difficult to distinguish whether you or
6:20	·	some other ancestor made the contribution.
6:23	·	Within a very short time, we descend from an anonymous stream of humanity, we are
6:28	·	individually shaped by a few recent ancestral generations, we strongly shape a few generations
6:33	·	of our descendants, and then our contribution passes into an anonymous stream of humanity.
6:39	·	With the aid of some speculation, an example
6:43	·	from a royal family can help illustrate this.
6:46	·	The current King of the United Kingdom is Charles III. At the bottom of the screen, his
6:51	·	father's contribution to his DNA is highlighted in purple and his mother's is highlighted in orange.
6:55	·	Charles's mother was Elizabeth II,
6:58	·	who was Queen for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022. Charles inherited half of his genome from her,
7:05	·	including his X chromosome and his mitochondrial DNA. This contribution to Charles's DNA remains
7:11	·	highlighted in orange.
7:13	·	Her father was George VI, King during World War II. Already at this stage of descent,
7:19	·	the randomness of meiosis begins to play a role: grandparents do not contribute equally to their
7:24	·	grandchildren. In our hypothetical scenario, we might imagine that George contributed slightly
7:29	·	more than half of the genes that Elizabeth passed on to Charles. This contribution remains
7:34	·	highlighted at the bottom of the screen.
7:36	·	George's father (Charles's great-grandfather) was George V, King during World War I. In our
7:43	·	scenario, George V contributed a heavy proportion of the genes that his son eventually passes on to
7:48	·	Charles. Note that despite his genetic closeness to Charles, George V's DNA makes no contribution
7:55	·	at all to Chromosome 17.
7:57	·	George V's father was Edward VII, who was heir apparent for 60 years and King for 9. At this
8:04	·	stage, each ancestor should account for 6.25% of their great-great-grandchildren's genes. In our
8:10	·	scenario, Edward instead contributed 10.33%.
8:15	·	His mother (Charles's 3rd-great-grandmother) was Queen Victoria, who ruled England for most of the
8:20	·	19th century and whose 9 children intermarried with the various royal houses of Europe and thus
8:25	·	fought on both sides of World War I.
8:28	·	Her father was Prince Edward of Kent and Strathearn, who had an unimpressive
8:32	·	military career that ended prematurely after he was stripped of command of the outpost of
8:36	·	Gibraltar following a mutiny. He theoretically remained Governor of Gibraltar but was forbidden
8:42	·	to travel there again. Because Edward was Charles's 4th-great-grandfather,
8:47	·	one of 64 ancestors contributing to 473 genetic slots, it is almost certain that he
8:53	·	passed on genes to Charles. In our scenario, he contributed an outsized 5.3% of Charles's genome.
9:00	·	Edward's mother was Charlotte, a
9:03	·	German who married George III and became the Queen of Great Britain during the American Revolution.
9:08	·	In reality, she very likely contributed to King Charles's genetics, although on average,
9:13	·	ancestors of her generation contributed less than a percent each. In our scenario, she contributed
9:18	·	2.6% of Charles's genome.
9:20	·	Charlotte's father, Charles Louis Frederick, was three months old when his own father died. He
9:26	·	never inherited the duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and lived in a small castle, where he enjoyed
9:31	·	playing the transverse flute. There is a 91% chance that he contributed to King Charles's
9:36	·	genetics.
9:37	·	Adolphus Frederick II was himself born posthumously and ruled over the small
9:42	·	province of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. There is a 72% chance that he contributed to King Charles's
9:47	·	genetics. By this point, 9 generations deep into a family tree, the average ancestor contributes a
9:54	·	single snippet of DNA to their descendant. In our scenario, Duke Adolphus contributed a hefty 0.66%
10:03	·	of Charles's genome.
10:04	·	The Duke's father, Adolphus Frederick I, reigned as Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin throughout the
10:09	·	first half of the 1600s, except for a brief time when Catholics under von Wallenstein seized the
10:15	·	province during the Thirty Years' War. There is a 50% chance that he contributed something to King
10:20	·	Charles's genetics.
10:23	·	His mother Sophia had married the Duke of Mecklenburg, who later split the duchy in half
10:27	·	for his two sons. There is a 32% chance that she contributed anything to King Charles's genetics.
10:33	·	Sophia's mother Christine was one
10:35	·	of ten children of the Landgrave of Hesse and was almost married to the King of Sweden, but instead
10:41	·	married the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. There is a 19% chance that she contributed anything to
10:46	·	King Charles's genetics. In our scenario, she contributed exactly the same stretches of DNA
10:53	·	to Charles that her daughter did, making their genetic contributions to him indistinguishable.
10:57	·	Christine's mother, also
11:00	·	named Christine, was married to Philip of Hesse, who felt disgusted by her and openly practiced
11:05	·	a bigamous marriage with another woman. There is an 11% chance that she contributed anything
11:10	·	to King Charles's genetics. In our scenario, we have arrived at a single tiny snippet of DNA
11:16	·	shared between Christine and her descendant Charles, amounting to 0.05% of his genome.
11:21	·	Christine's mother Barbara was married
11:24	·	to the Duke of Saxony in front of more than 6,000 Polish and German nobles. There is a 6% chance
11:30	·	that she contributed anything to King Charles's genetics. In our scenario, her contribution to
11:35	·	Charles mirrored that of her daughter Christine.
11:38	·	Barbara's father Casimir IV Jagiellon ruled Lithuania and Poland from the 1440s until 1492,
11:45	·	when that territory stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. There is only a 3% chance that
11:49	·	he contributed anything to King Charles's genetics. In our hypothetical scenario,
11:54	·	he is the first genealogical ancestor in this line of descent to contribute nothing
11:59	·	to King Charles]s genome. All of Casimir's myriad ancestors would also contribute nothing at all to
12:05	·	Charles's genetics.
12:07	·	As Charles's case illustrates, had our genealogical ancestors not existed,
12:12	·	we would not exist, but their genetic contributions to us disappear with time,
12:17	·	much like our memories of them.
12:19	·	The same will become true for us and our own genetic contributions to our future descendants.
12:25	·	In a few short centuries, those descendants will resemble us only insofar as we are all made up
12:30	·	of the DNA of our ancient forebears, long since shattered into a cacophony of tiny fragments.

[Jamestown1630]

LOL!

I’m sure some illegitimate children were ‘covered up’ for what we would call ‘charitable’ reasons. Human nature has always been given to indiscretions, but also to virtues.

I don’t mean to insult anyone - genealogy is a fascinating study and knowing one’s own gives one a marvelous window on - and personal interest in - history.

My Grandmother, who raised me, was born in 1890, and lived until 1995. Her family stories, handed down from as far back as the Civil War and beyond, were my great fortune to hear and remember.

But we can never know from where/what we really come, in terms of blood.

All we can count on are the positive values and culture we’ve inherited and, hopefully, can pass on.

[Jamestown1630]

I think this is true. I recognize a lot of loves and interests in myself that I can see also in my father, grandparents, etc.

[Ezekiel]

Thanks much. That’s a term I hadn’t heard, or had completely forgotten about along the way (I can’t ever tell any more, arrg). In any case, I looked that up.

I enjoy these types of thinking exercises because I’m always on the lookout for some odd angle. In the case of the ship, for example...

... what if the replacement boards had come from trees grown from seed of the trees that formed the original hull?

It can get pretty murky quickly.

Taking that into the questions and definitions of human identity, here’s where I might inadvertently ‘cross a line ‘ for no readers in particular. But for anyone who can appreciate the simple innocence of the thought process:

I know there are many bad actors out there, and people who will help themselves to others’ identities given the opportunity... such as, those who can trace their born-in-the-USA ancestry back several generations, yet their beliefs and actions proclaim ‘card-carrying commie hell-bent on the destruction of America.’

Something went missing in the DNA, or this was an alien seed from the start. Un-American.

So, one thing I’ve come upon repeatedly is in the topic of Jewish conversion — that a convert is not to be treated as any less of a Jew than one who was born from a Jewish mother.

The reasoning goes something like this, that the conversion is evidence that the person’s soul was present at Sinai along with all the rest, but got separated. And in fact, this soul is on a higher level for managing to make the long, arduous journey home after thousands of years of wandering through the world of Gentile nations. Ergo, that’s one motivated soul! Kol hakavod, all the respect, don’t diss the convert..

What happened is that this concept merged in my mind (I’m always looking from the outside in) along with the traditional explanation that the Temples were destroyed on account of baseless hatred.

So I thought about these Jewish souls lost in the Gentile world — stashed deep cover so to speak — yet there is so much chatter and lamentation about all the ways that Esau and gang cause trouble, maybe not in a hostile sense but through assimilation. America — ground zero for assimilation, for Jewish souls losing their way! Everyone gets along! Don’t they know better? Chanukah bushes, exhibit A.

And so this doesn’t appear to count as lashon hara because they’re the Gentile enemies of the Jewish People since time immemorial, or something like that.

Like I said, there are some truly bad characters out there, not to mention all the depravity, and everyone has a right to self-defense, and to live righteously without being attacked for it, but who’s to say in this vast sea of humanity what Gentile is actually one of those Jewish souls still on its long journey home?

As an analog to this Sinai convert narrative, Americans in their heart and soul were Americans before they made it home to the physical shoreline. That’s why they made the arduous journey.

Has this grand scheme of souls on their journeys occurred to anyone? Because if it had, it might cause a shift in how others are perceived and treated on any given day.

I’ve seen that the book of Jonah is read on Yom Kippur because Jonah is analogous to the soul on its journey:

https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/430304/jewish/The-Story-of-Your-Life.htm

Well anyway, this is not in any way meant to accuse anyone of anything. I’m always on a separate frequency. That much is obvious. I like to find ways that people should *want* to get along. New ways of approaching “difficult” questions, for those truly in search of solutions far above the world where nothing ever changes.

It sort of reminds me of the trope about the king going out in disguise to mingle with his subjects, but the only person who recognizes him is a lowly maidservant. She treats him like royalty, even though he looks like something the cat dragged in.

Finally, a worthy bride for the lonely king.

[Jamestown1630]

I'm sorry, I made an error - by grandmother died in 1985, just short of her 95th birthday. (I wish she had lived until 1995 - she could have met my husband :-)

[SunkenCiv]

It’s akin to the old time joke, it’s had five new handles and two new heads, but it’s still great-grampa’s axe.

[OrioleFan]

I’m thinking about starting a project in my families creating Google earth files for all the cemetery information I’ve accumulated from the find a grave website. I did it for all the covered bridges in Ohio when I was a Covid shut in.

North Carolina had a statewide cemetery catalog project. I assisted in McDowell county with a couple of cemeteries.

I wish there was a standard way to write an obituary. I spend a lot of time mapping out family connections as I decipher obituaries. A well written obituary is a treasure trove of information that can be expanded with all the research tools we have today.

The absolute worst source of information is the Catholic Church. They can confirm some information you have but won’t give you access to their records to do research. You have to know what they have to request the information, so I don’t play the Catch 22 game. Funny thing, all this genealogy started with the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Church is a Johnie come lately to the party.

I’ve been told, if you want to go to Europe to do research, you should go to one of the Latter Day Saints Centers - might save you a trip. I’ve found and photocopied a lot of information at my local LDS center. Very helpful people there.