CLAY COUNTY CONNECTIONS
(Reprinted with Permission from The Brazil Times 2/8/01)
Written by Emma Lawson Thompson
We have an eight-year-old granddaughter, Caitlin, born in October 1992.
The span of time from the year Caitlin was born, back to Christopher
Columbus stumbling into the West Indies in October, 1492, is exactly five
hundred years.
If you figure the span of a generation at an average of twenty-five years,
the startling fact is that when Columbus arrived in the New World, Caitlin
had approximately 1,048, 576 ancestors who were alive at that time,
roaming around Europe.
Just think. That figure covers only five hundred years! Take it back
another five hundred years, to about the year 1000. It is mind numbing.
Each generation doubles the number of your ancestors within that
generation: two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16
great-great-grandparents, and so on. See where I’m going? At 525 years,
the figure is 2,079,152, and at 550 years the figure is 4,194,040. Are you
getting the feeling that if we take it back far enough most of us are
related to each other?
All of those people getting together to produce you! Add together all of
those generations of ancestors who have died, and the number is
phenomenal. Doesn’t it give you a shivery feeling? Doesn’t it make you
want to know something about them? Won’t you look at pictures in history
books and think, “That’s my nose,” or “Those are my eyes?”
If you take the calculation back far enough, there may even be a
population number at which you would be theoretically related to everyone
alive at the time. But I think perhaps I’ve taken this back far enough.
You get the picture. Genealogy really expands and challenges the mind. It
makes you feel like Sherlock Holmes. (Humm – he must have been Welsh –
Holmes is a Welsh name.) See what I mean. It can exercise the memory, the
logic, the ingenuity and the inquisitiveness of anyone who becomes
involved.
“Genealogy begins as an interest, Becomes a hobby, Continues as an
avocation, Takes over as an obsession, And in its last state, Is an
incurable disease.”
{From Owen County History and Genealogy}
Don’t forget, if you have a question you think one of our readers might
have the answer to, send it in to Emma Lawson Thompson at the Center Point
Genealogical Library at P.O. Box 56; Center Point, IN 47840. We’ll print
it and see if we can find an answer, which we’ll also print.