One in a Million

It took 2 parents to get you here. Each of your parents had 2 parents, as did each of their parents. You are the product of 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, 32 great-great-great-grandparents, and so on. If you keep multiplying the number by 2, you would end up with over 1 million progenitors in a scant 500 years.

But let's be a bit more realistic. We can't assume that all of our ancestors were unrelated. In fact, just three generations back in my family, a brother married the sister of his 2 brothers-in-law. Huh?

George W. Coker married Annie Stinnett. His sister, Lizzie, married Annie's brother John. And his sister, Lettie, married Annie's brother, Thomas. I found double cousins that I never knew existed before 1992. What if some of us had met and married, not knowing our common history of shared great-great-grandparents? Probably not a really big deal except in the case of genetically inherited illnesses.

Slim pickings in the Ozarks back in the day account for families like this; likely due to geographic immobility. In those days, distant (and not-so-distant) cousins were more likely to have married than not. This results in the same remote ancestors showing up again and again. It is also very likely if your ancestors come from one location. In other words, if your ancestors came from a resticted locale, then the further back you go, the more likely it is that someone else from that locale is related to you. Factor in the history of slavery in the United States, and you'll understand why folks ask, "Who's your Momma?"

Rootwalking

I was surprised (not really) to see that it's been almost a year since I posted anything. So, even though I should be doing something else right now, I'll take a minute to just try and get back into the habit.

I've been making great strides on the genealogy front. It's not that I've finally identified all the generations of my people, but I have filled in a lot of blanks. I've tried to get my family to participate in the quest but I guess, unlike me, they'd rather be out participating in the world, while I'm content to sit at my computer and hunt my ancestors. I'm not passing judgement, I'm just making an observation. After all, we should each do what suits us best. For me, that's being the family detective, or as my sister affectionately calls me, The Stalker.

I can't help but be fascinated by the mystery of who we are. I get goosebumps when I run across a record that contains a name that might be one of ours. I spend hours thinking about what the lives of our ancestors must have been like.

For example, Charity Brown, my great-grandmother, travelled from Grimes County, Texas in a covered wagon in the 1880s and settled in Oswego, Kansas with her son, Dennis and her mother, Nellie. I wonder how they funded the trip, what they dreamed about, how they mananaged to survive in a place that was not exactly happy about the influx of Exodusters from Texas.

And, there's Nellie, who spent her final years in the State Hospital at Osawatomie because she kept wandering off in search of the children she lost during slavery. She was almost 100 years old when she died. What stories she could have told!

There are few remaining who can tell us the stories that made us who we are. So I've taken it upon myself to be the storyteller, the rootwalker.

Visit one of my family pages at http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/c/o/k/Joyce-Coker/index.html to get a peek at who we are.