Claiming a Famous Baseball Relative

[z28jd]

Originally Posted by sbfinley

The title of this thread reminded me of an article on genealogy I read awhile back. Essentially there is a period of time, continentally about 1,000 years, where if you trace back to any random person living at that time there is a 80% chance you are descended from that person in some manner. The basis is that with every generation your number of ancestors doubles but the number of actual ancestors remains static and eventually they reach an equilibrium. So if you are of European decent you can take any living person from roughly 1,000 years ago (Charlemagne, Eric the Red, William I, or any random person slain in the Norman conquest) and by math there is an 80% chance you can trace - should such records exist - your genealogy back to find that person in your family tree.

Should that be true it’s interesting to me that my descendants a millennium from now could read about Babe Ruth, Tom Seaver, Bryce Harper, and Hawk Tuah Girl and probably be distantly related to most of them.

I was able to trace many lines back to William the Conqueror, so I looked it up and it was estimated that 50% of people in England are related to him, but actually being able to trace roots that far puts you in a group much smaller. I think the number was 4%. However, if you go back 11 generations earlier, they say approximately 98% of people with European heritage would be related to Charlemange. That's based on the amount of kids he had and the small population back then.

I didn't do any of this tracing work other than finding my great-grandmother on the genealogy site. She was the only one I found of my eight great-grandparents who had anything more than three generations earlier on their tree.

What's funny is that my other great-grandparent on that side is actually a Rockefeller (cousin of the rich family, though I do have a great-uncle named John D Rockefeller), so I figured he would have a tree for sure on the site I'm using. He barely does. Then I just happened to click her side and it's huge. So I have huge lines of royalty mixing with Rockefeller blood and my grandmother (their child) married a poor first-generation US Irishman, had nine kids and lived dirt poor.

Finding numerous kings was cool, but they are all so far back. I tried to find relatives who were within the tenth great-grandparents range. All of them are cousins, not direct ancestors, but besides Grover Cleveland Alexander, I found Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Harrison (not his Presidential grandfather), Franklin Pierce, John Pemberton (Coca-Cola inventor) and James Fenimore Cooper, which came in on his grandmother's side, so I didn't get the founder of Cooperstown (he was married at the time to my relative, so maybe I can count it, even though she's never given any credit).

Those results are with me checking 500+ famous people who had family trees available, including many many baseball players. As you can see, I'm doing much better with non-baseball finds.