July 04, 2004

• I've heard about this before but not before seen it so completely written. Also: the couple of people are me and my sister and the answer is incest.
• Nice article! I was really into tracing my family tree for several years. It's a lot of fun if you like doing research, following clues, and becoming familiar with the history of the relevant areas. Then I hit the proverbial brick wall using internet sources, and it's been impractical to travel to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia, etc., to read the paper documents that might get me further. I wish I had asked questions of my grandparents, but it never occurred to me while they were alive that I would ever care about that stuff. But now, I can comfort myself that I am descended from all those famous people. Perfect! On preview: Hey, Alnedra - check out the picture links in ActuallySettle's profile. I'd have been attracted to that dark edge in the day.
• This is fascinating. One thing the article only briefly touches on, however, is the extent to which geneology is not a science, but a very precarious art. It's not just that most people in the past weren't famous, and didn't own land or do anything that would get them into records other than baptismal, but the baptismal records themselves are difficult. In some places, like Puerto Rico (or so a friend doing her own geneology reports), the church apparently kept wonderful babtismal records (from a geneological point of view) that listed not only the names of the parents, but both sets of grandparents as well. And, of course, in Spanish fashion, women were known by both their maiden and married name. However, in places like England, you get only the family name of the father, and the first names of the parents, and even then sometimes only the father's first name. Moreover, the repeditive names make it sometimes impossible to know which John or Jane Smith from the six that could be in a given parish that this person was' it can be very hard to identify their marriage (and thus a woman's birth name) or their births. I realised this last year, when doing a little research, that tracing someone even over one life can be nearly impossible, let alone following a family through generation after generation.
• jb; have you looked into the naming tradiions of previous centurties? I've found this really helpful. Naming Traditions from http://www.rootsweb.com/~genepool/naming.htm Our ancestors often used the following naming procedure when picking out a name for a new child. This explains why certain names are VERY common in a given family line. Watching for these patterns can help in your genealogy research. 1st son = father's father 2nd son = mother's father 3rd son = father 4th son = father's oldest brother 5th son = father's 2nd oldest brother or mother's oldest brother 1st dau = mother's mother 2nd dau = father's mother 3rd dau = mother 4th dau = mother's oldest sister 5th dau = mother's 2nd oldest sister or father's oldest sister
• It's a nice post, but I don't really think it is an answer. I don't think a mathematical equation can sum up even 100 years worth of human descendancy. These folks seem to be a little rosy on 'social mobility', IMHO. I think that it's easy to see how US presidents and other wealthy, famous folk can be descended from the royals, after all they have been mostly rich, Protestant and all white. Opportunity breeds opportunity. And exactly how long has it been since the last western serf was freed? I didn't see that in the calculations, and I don't really know. I'll bet there wasn't a lot of interbreeding going on between the serfs and their masters before their freedom, probably not much after either. Sure there would be exceptions, but I don't think these centuries of breeding went on like a random event. The whole thing just seems a little too precious to me. But anyway, It's a good find. Thanks!
• Actually, there might not have been much breeding between masters and serfs. A professor who has written a book on serfdom told a class I was in that the famous right to sleep with a serf's bride on the wedding night (I think it was in Braveheart, but I don't remember the name) is a myth made up by peasants (exagerration of crimes is a common trope in polemic literature of the time). There is no evidence of it, and he said that if it had happened, the Church certainly would have raised a stink. But, of course, illegitimate children with all sorts of fathers have always popped up - that what I was doing the name research on (I was trying to track the parents of illegitimate children). path: That is a very interesting pattern, and I will look for it, but from what I have seen so far, I don't know how closely it was followed (children seem to have often been named for parents and relatives, but not in a specific pattern). Names do certainly follow in families - parents' names almost always seem to appear among their children, and my advisor has even come across two siblings, both living, with the same name (maybe they called one Big and one Little? But the few number of Christian names in fashion also mean that c.1600-1800 there could easily be unrelated (or distantly related) people in the same parish with the same name.
• That'd be le droit du seigneur, I think.
• For the Chinese, it's a tad bit simpler, especially if you know what village your family was from in China. The village elders would pick a line from a poem, and the children of each sucessive generation are will have a word in their name corresponding to the words in the poem. So let's say the poem is six words long: A - first generation; B - second generation; C - third generatio; and so on. By the fifth or sixth generation, the village elders will find another line of poetry to continue. Many Chinese nowadays have names of two characters (Surname + Personal name) instead of three characters (Surname + Generation name + Personal name, order for last two characters may differ), because they have not been back to their villages to obtain the characters. And some have three character names which are not linked to their generation. And of course, usually, daughters are exempt from this naming convention. *sniff* Hey, Alnedra - check out the picture links in ActuallySettle's profile. I'd have been attracted to that dark edge in the day. Um... what should I be looking out for, exactly?
• I think we both know exactly what you should be looking out for: my ass when I dunk down in the water to catch minnows with my beak. Look at it wiggle. Quack quack quack o<. Look at me help you solve inequalities in second grade. I'm a greedy duck, quack. o< 30 I am more than 30
• ActuallySettle, you do not want to know what a duck means in colloquial Chinese. Or you wouldn't be making the duck jokes. I'm almost thirty myself, actually. *sigh* where does the time go?
• I am proud of my duck heritage. You can't take that away from me. You can shoot me, send me anywhere from Lyon to Peking and you won't take that away from me. My flavor might be in my fat and liver but my soul is in the sky.
• Ok. Just wanted to tell you that a guy who says he's a duck in Chinese is saying that he's either a gigolo or a male prostitute. Ye have been warned. (My fav part of duck: gizzard. mmmm...)
• I would know nothing of such morally corrupt human matters because I am "only" a duck, and when I type quotation marks (which is hard, since I can only type with my beak, I have to use the caps key for one character, and my eyes are on the side of my head, so I have to tilt it to see anything and then hope for the best when I bring my beak down) I mean that I am not "only" a duck, I mean that in some sense I am better, less complex, more noble, than any human with the exception of Carmen Miranda and apparently this Turkmenbashi character.
• Alnedra, what's the background behind that? I can't imagine how a male gigolo/prostitute compares to a duck, except for maybe some hot bill-dipping action.
• Well, female prostitutes are called "chickens", probably because in many dialects, the word for "prostitute" and the word for "chicken" sound very much alike (you still hear men say, they're "calling chickens" or "hanging up chickens" when they mean they going to...you know. My guess is that male ones are called "ducks" to match the poultry image. Interestingly though, gay men are called "rabbits". I have no idea of the etymology of that term.
• Alnedra - click on his "posted by" name in a comment. He has links to 2 pictures at the bottom of his bio. goetter - the pattern isn't perfect, but it has helped me look at specific information based on a name and got me past some uncertainties by giving more seach criteria.
• Uh...why does he have his mouth open in the second picture? *feels slightly afraid* path, you're a dear. Are you trying to matchmake us?
• Alendra - of course I was, being a grandmotherish type person. But later events have convinced that he's not for you. Just wait, and I'll find the right one. Or, maybe I'll mind my own business, hard as it might be. Hug.
• Hug back! :) It's ok, path, I'm pretty happy now. With friends and crushes and you monkeys, my time's all filled up!
• Being childless and likely to remain so, this part depressed the hell out of me for some reason: "Toward the end of our conversation Humphrys pointed out something I hadn't considered. The same process works going forward in time; in essence every one of us who has children and whose line does not go extinct is suspended at the center of an immense genetic hourglass. Just as we are descended from most of the people alive on the planet a few thousand years ago, several thousand years hence each of us will be an ancestor of the entire human race
• Just adopt one. We are.
• PS, ereshkigal, if that came across as a bit too brusque it wasn't meant that way. There is much more to be passed on to future generations than the merely genetic.
• Thanks for the great link, Skrik. I'm sending this to all the geneology freaks in my family. Wolof, congratulations! I wish more people would adopt. Nurture is definitely underrated.
• I think scepticism about the droit du seigneur is probably justified, but human nature being what it is, I expect there was rampant nookie between different social classes on a consensual basis anyway. Remember Chaucer: ...She was a prymerole, a piggesnye, For any lord to leggen in his bedde, Or yet for any good yeman to wedde.
• Thanks to Alnedra, however, I may never be able to order Peking Duck in a restaurant again.
• Plegmund - yes, you are definately right. That was the conclusion of my paper on bastardy in a small village in England, c. 1680-1750. Nookie was happening between classes, though generally the women were of the same of lower class than the men. (except it was such a small village that the upper class were the yeomen, and the lower class weavers and labourers.) The saddest bit was the way all but one illegitimate child either died or were lost to the records - half had only their birth recorded. But one did grow up to be a blacksmith and take over his maternal grandfather's shop; he was a village constable and had a large family of his own. He was my happy story.
• You're welcome, Plegmund. *grin* more for me then! I remember a short story for young adults or children, about a scientist who found a way of viewing the past. Genealogy became worldwide obssession. The crux of the story was that everyone had a famous ancestor somewhere along the line, but not the inventor. They went as far back as proto-humans, and was unable to find a single famous or dominant ancestor. I can't even remember who wrote it anymore, although I think it was under the auspices of one of Isaac Asimov's series.