Researching the Family Tree

I just go in our backyard when I want to explore our family tree

I had a lot of fun with it. Was able to go back several hundred years. I thought it was really, really neat.

I did my paternal grandfather's tree back to a great, great.....grandfather born in Martaize, France in 1601. That's the furthest back I could go.

One of my cousins on my dad's side did a full ancestry dating back to 3 brothers in Pontarlier, France.

We're actually decendents of Meriwether Lewis of Lewis & Clark.

I got dutch and Cajun ancestors back to the 1600s. Not so far back on my mothers side.

It's all fun and games till you learn great great grand pappy dumped his first wife for the "help".

My dad got the DNA cheek swab from Ancestry and it's come back inconclusive 2 times now. They sent him another one that he hasn't sent back yet. If that one comes back inconclusive the only conclusion is that I must be part alien.

Also, I'm related to a guy from one of the Ancestry.com commercials that are currently playing, he's black, I'm not.

Yes. I was just looking at my tree a few minutes ago. I sent off both parents DNA earlier this month. I received 2 emails that said DNA samples were received. It hasn't updated on the status bars yet.
I found out some cool things about my family too. Also my SO's family. His mom didn't know her father. Well...found his whole side. She doesn't want to hear about it.

I haven't looked into it in a few years, but what I have of my family tree is well over a thousand pages, from several relatively close sources online. Descended from Charlemagne (800 a.d.) and later English (well, Norman, actually) royalty, as likely millions of others are also. I think of this every time I go sit on my throne.

The interesting thing to me is that we each have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, etc., with each generation doubling the number of ancestors (16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096 and so on). Within the span of a thousand years your number of ancestors would reach millions if you could identify them all.

However, as we time travel into the past it is known that the population gets smaller and smaller in number. Thus, anthropologists and mathematicians have actually developed a formula to calculate the probability that persons share common ancestors. According to their estimates, everyone of European ancestry probably has a common ancestor within the past 600 to 1000 years, we just don't know it. You likely married a distant cousin, and have some ancestors who appear in your family tree more than once.

Now with DNA advances scientists have been able to identify ancestry identifiers dating back more than 30,000 years.