------------------- we were talking about playing casinos or lotteries being “a tax on the lack of math skills” in another post. I got another pet peeve on “lack of math skills.”
I know lots of folks who are really into geneology and their ancestors going way back. I have never understood the fascination for some about geneology. Let’s assume you get 1/4 of your genes from each grandparent. So, the grandparent who shares your surname is 25%, in theory, of who you are today. So, each generation that you go back, you go from 1/4, to 1/8, to 1/32, to 1/64, to 1/128, to 1/256, to 1/512, to 1/1024, etc. of that ancestor who shares your surname. So, that ancestor ten generations back who emigrated to America makes up only .0001% of who you are today. Your connection to him is only theoretical at best and mostly meaningless in reality. It is just a name and who you are is mostly from the 99.9999% of your ancestors who did not have the same surname as you. Thanks for letting me rant. I feel much better now.
I tend to agree. I think AncestryDNA or 23andMe gives you much more information about who you are than the countless hours my grandmother spent going through courthouse records in Tennessee and Virginia.
I know LDS places a great deal of emphasis on genealogy so that unbaptized ancestors can be baptized by proxy in the temple. That’s at least part of the fascination. We’re not LDS though. Ancestry began as a Mormon project in pursuit of that.
Correct. LDS as in our visitors at Razorback Stadium on Sept. 16.
Grandma was an Elwell, so she tracked back the Necessarys and the Elwells, and perhaps the Guthries too (her mom was a Guthrie). There was an Elwell on a ship named the Mayflower in the early 1600s, but not THE Mayflower. There were multiple ships out of England named the Mayflower; this one apparently came over four times after the Pilgrims, then left in 1641 on a fifth trip to Virginia and never arrived.
I think the tribe your ancestors hung out with is much more important than tenuous name connections in your family tree. For instance, most of my ancestors were Scotch-Irish, the protestant losers (Cromwell’s Modern Model Army) of the English Civil War that got run out of Great Britain after the Royalist and Church of England won and brought the hammer down on the losers. They mostly stuck together migrating through the south and into south Arkansas before I joined up. Folks tended to intermarry within the tribe so most of my ancestry is British, Northern England, and Northern European, except that I am .6% West African which explains my “better than the average white guy dancing ability.” There is a legend in the family about an ancestor who married an “Indian Princess” and got run out of Virginia into South Carolina because of it. Maybe she was a Zulu Princess.
