I have a cousin in Virginia that I
correspond with. She has become
interested in family history and begun tracing her ancestors. Being a nihilist (and a know-it-all) I wrote
to her of the futility and inherent false results of such effort.
To begin with ancestors
multiply at an exponential rate. In
non-mathematical language you have two parents, four grand parents, eight great grand
parents, sixteen great great grand parents: then thirty-two, sixty-four, one
hundred and twenty eight…..etc. Your
kind ship dilutes by one half with each succeeding generation you trace back to.
(Never end a sentence with a preposition – fuck the rules.) Ten generations back you are equally kin to
two thousand and forty-eight ancestors; and if you carry it back to twenty
generations – over two million.
At what point does the gene
pool so diluted that you are realistically no longer kin?
Probably, most people try to
track their paternal name. This also is
an inexact effort. This day and age,
with birth control, women have fewer children and are freer to have sex without
consequences. Now, it has been my
experience that married women are more likely to be receptive to a one night
(one week, one month) dalliance with no commitment than single women. After being married for a few years, and
having your husband with his back to you in bed let out a fart, you might say
the bloom has left the roses. Women
like to feel they are still sexually attractive and an exciting tryst with one
of the husband’s friends is probably more common in marriage than admitted.
A few generations back
(pre-birth control) pregnancies that occurred from such unions were easily
covered up by the wife telling her husband, “Look dear, he has your nose.” And, when a child stood out from the rest of
the brood she could say, “He looks like my side of the family.”
This is the point of Chaos
theory: there are chance variables in every situation that can change the
results.
There is no way of knowing at
what point in your track you will run into an ancestor “born on the other side
of the bed.” At that point, though
the name continues, the blood tie (as small as it is likely to be) has been
derailed.
This day and age the above
scenario may sound unlikely, but in earlier time this was not uncommon.
As per my earlier post: I was raised by my grandmother, who I thought
was my mother. One of my sisters was
actually my mother and my other sisters and brothers were my uncles and aunts. When my grandmother took me she didn’t like
the name on my birth certificate so she changed it. She also didn’t like my birth date so she
changed that to a war memorial holiday (probably so she could remember
it.) I grew up as an alias. I never found out about this until I was
nineteen and tried to obtain a birth certificate to join the Navy and
discovered I did not exist.
Generations ago I am sure
that many parents raised children of their daughters under similar
circumstances, giving them their sir name.
Besides me, I know of two more just in my family (Of course you realize
I am of the south.) At any rate this
makes following a paternal name speculative at best.
For myself, I don’t count my
heritage any further than my birth. I know where I am from: the Mississippi Delta.
