I am also a genealogist. Part of a common thread that runs down through the generations, alongside inherited hair color, eye color, body structure and such, is temperament and talents.
Back to the Plymouth Pilgrims, for example: to this day, ancestors of Bradford and Brewster (Brewster was Cambridge educated - the meeting/dining hall he would have attended is the very same used in the Harry Potter series. I get a kick out of that.)
Anyway, Brewster was also a writer and a publisher. He operated a clandestine printing house during the 12 years the Pilgrims spent in Holland previous to embarking upon their historic venture. He published tracts against the Crown, including the (in)famous “Perth Assembly”. The Crown wanted his head, preferably on a stake. They set Pinkerton detectives on his trail. (Brewster made his living teaching English at Leyden University.)
They would go to Holland and be skulking around to find him and his presses while Brewster would actually be secretly back in England. Then the Pinkerton's and Brewster would switch locations again. They were getting too close and had captured one of his associates. That was one of the catalysts, along with realizing that their children were growing up to more Hollanders than English, that kicked the Pilgrim's resolve to find a land where they could be out from under the watchful eyes of the crown - and not be arrested for owning/reading a Bible and taking their religious practices from it instead of the Church of England.
The Brewsters had taken in the young William Bradford while still in England after he was ostracized by his family for consorting with the Separatists at Scrooby Manor - home of the Brewsters. It was under Brewster's tutelage that Bradford became educated.
Back to inherited genes that go beyond the physical. Down through the Bradford/Brewster generations, one finds writers, publishers and artists at a prominent rate. (Even in the present generation, my cousin spent his life as a writer, editor (taking the gov’t to task) and has several books published. One of my sons has published work and I have made my living as an investigative reporter (taking on the powers that be,) once had my own little publication and retired, keeping my hand in only with an occasional free lance feature and my column, which I just ‘retired’ from after a 20+ year run - with a cherry on top, winning first place again for my column in the state's Press Association.
Conversely, in seeing the generations of another family from the Mayflower - the Billington’s, one of the ‘strangers’ families, not one of the ‘saints’ - the ‘bad seed’ genes are still manifesting themselves in today.
The Billington’s were trouble from the get go. They signed on as indentured servants in England. Their kid almost blew the Mayflower up in the middle of the ocean - playing with fire next to powder kegs. Once on land, he created a mess when he wandered off into the woods, necessitating a search party to be sent out for days - at a time when every hand was needed to ensure survival against the winter in a land with no Holiday Inn down the road.
In later years - not to many - the father earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first criminal hung in the Colony - for murder.
Their descendants today often come up on the wrong side of the law.
And so it goes. Today, think about the families such people as jimmah C., Bubba and the little messiah come from?
As for antecedents, Jimmy Carter's family (if you can believe PBS) were foursquare and conservative by today's standards, whereas Bill Clinton came from -- sorry, but I think the word fits -- a low woman, and it shows. I think he grew up in the back rooms of a Hot Springs cat house, rushing beers for the madame and getting paid in sex. I don't think he's ever been "the man from Hope", I think he's always been "the man from the Warm Springs Motel". His own criminality in office in Arkansas and D.C. will have been enough -- if he does nothing else -- to poison the next seven generations of his issue.
The Bushes aren't the Yankees they hold themselves out to be. Well, maybe Barbara is (I think she's a snob, which is why Nancy wouldn't invite the Bushes up to the family quarters while the Reagans lived there: because Nancy knew Babs would never, ever have returned the favor), but Prescott Bush was a shoe salesman from Ohio who went East to find his fortune by chatting up the fellows at Yale. Worked out well for him: he found himself a U.S. Senator, eventually. As for Poppy, he was Pressy's boy all right: Mr. Serviceability fit almost exactly the damning line Shakespeare wrote about Lepidus (actually Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, scion of a house nearly as proud as the Julians') in his play Julius Caesar: "He is a slight man, meet to be sent on errands."
Journalist Murray Kempton, I think it was, developed a relationship with Richard Nixon after Nixon's fall and retirement rather like Camille Paglia's with Rush Limbaugh: mismatched and occasional, but cordial and frank. Gore Vidal, in his most recent book, says that Kempton once told him about a luncheon at which Kempton had asked Nixon his opinion of Poppy Bush. Nixon replied that Bush was one of "those people" who have no particular virtue or competence and are generally useless, but they're so well-connected as to be almost inevitable, so that the best way to deal with them is to appoint them to something just to get them out from underfoot. And that is what Nixon did with Bush Pere -- Bush was Chairman of the RNC during the Watergate scandal and was summoned as such to testify to the Watergate Committee by Sam Ervin. Like his younger clone, Robert Odle (the first witness), Bush was an early witness called to help lay out the wiring diagram of the RNC and who knew or reported to whom, and where were you and what did you know on the night in question? That sort of thing.
So even though George H.W. Bush attended Andover and Yale and did all the Yankee-legacy things, he was nevertheless the son of an affinity-group-mining Buckeye shoe salesman who learned how to qualify his customers and serve them well.
Minor point here: Ohio was the hotbed of the old Whig Party, whose national totem was always "development" and big infrastructural projects and -- as it handed its leadership off to the Republican Party -- the railroad land grants and the homesteading scheme. So the "big government conservatives" of the 1840's eventually became the Rockefeller-Bush-Dole wing of the GOP, which explains David Stockman's "pigs at the trough" comment to William Greider of The Atlantic Monthly in 1982 or 1982 and the drunken-sailor spending of 43's administration. These people are absolutely not Reaganauts or Goldwaterites or anything remotely approaching conservative.
Dubya is another story entirely, and it would be interesting to see a book by someone who neither owes him nor hates him. I saw Stone's film, and it was like gazing at reality through a baguette-cut ruby: distorted, and deeply pink. Dubya has a lot of Texas in him, but he was Yale-educated for the worse and I think it shows, not least in the foisting off on him of so many of his daddy's chamberlains like Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Condi Rice. Heck, it's almost impossible to name a 43 functionary who didn't have a job in 41's administration someplace, even Robert Gates, an old family servant from way back who brought Yankeefied cultural imperialism to the unfortunate students of Texas A&M, the "improvement" (i.e. denaturing) of whose campus Poppy settled on as a retirement project. A&M now has its second Bushy president in a row; the new one, replacing Gates, is a Cubana whose brief (from Poppy himself, I'm sure) is the "cultural broadening" and "diversification" of the A&M campus. Which I think may be code for sending those poor, white Scots-Irish kids back up into their piney woods to learn air-conditioning repair and the arts of deference to their social betters instead of going to college, and reserving their slots for minorities instead, esp. Hispanics (i.e. Mexican irredentists).