How Big is Your Family TreeUpdated July 28, 2007Let's just focus on ancestors first. You have:
That's just 10 generations and totals 2,030 ancestors (and if just one of those people decided to not have kids with their partner (also your ancestor), you wouldn't be here). Of course, this assumes that there hasn't been any incest in your ancestry which could result in fewer ancestors. Likewise, if you have two children, and each of them have two children, and so forth, you would have 2,030 descendents in 10 generations. Now let's talk about cousins, aunts, and uncles (for the purposes of this calculation, we'll just call all of them "relatives"). Let's just say that one set of great great great great great great great great grandparents had two children, who each had two children and so forth. From that one set of grandparents who had 2,030 descendents (9 of which are your ancestors), you have 2,021 relatives. Multiply that by the 512 sets of gggggggg-grandparents you have, and you get 1,034,752. (How about that family reunion?) Of course, in reality some people didn't have children and others had upwards of 10 kids (and let's not forget about those who had children with multiple partners, but you get the idea.) 2,030 ancestors + about 1,034,752 relatives = 1,036,782 people in your family tree (and that just spans those who were a live for the past 300 years). There are about 6 billion people in the world. In 33 generations, one couple having two kids who each have two kids and so forth would have 8,589,934,592 descendents, and let's not even think about calculating how many relatives that is for somebody alive today. Next time you see a stranger, think about those numbers. The odds are very good that you and that stranger are related. If you see somebody who looks a bit like you, it's probably because you share an ancestor. |
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