Sunday, October 19, 2014

Amateur Genealogy

Genealogy becomes possible for everyone, these days.  All sorts of web tools, together with massive amounts of data, and millions of ordinary people sifting through it, together with the ability to automatically merge their findings, and things can happen.
Mathematically I am not surprised by this: suitable models of random graphs predict this.  Nonetheless I was quite surprised this morning to see that a few extra ancestors had been added to one root of my tree: and following back, I found it went back, and back, and back.....
It is said (with quite a lot of justification) that all people of European descent have a line back to Charlemagne: I didn't find that --- but I did find that the line went back through various people in France, back through Italy, with one branch purporting to start in 80AD.  Not sure how much credence to give to the data --- and it means nothing about who I am as a person, but it fun to pursue it back:-)

Your, in line,
N.