Whenever I mention the following set of facts, it either arouses perplexity, or generates a completely blank stare.

1) To know all of your 40-generation ancestry (back to about the time of Charlemagne) requires filling in over one trillion boxes on your ancestor chart.

2) The fortieth column of the chart (about 700 A.D., plus or minus a century) requires filling in over 500 billion boxes.

3) There was definitely a person in each of those boxes, or you would not have been born (at least you would not have been born as you).

4) The world population just passed six billion people.

The conundrum is this: If there are only slightly more than six billion people on the planet today, who belongs in those more than 500 billion boxes on your ancestor chart about 12 centuries ago?

Actually, there's only one possible explanation. The people in those more than 500 billion boxes cannot all be different individuals. A large number of the individuals from that time period each belong in a great number of different boxes on your chart.

This explanation either arouses more perplexity, or reinforces the completely blank stare. Descent from ancestors in two lines is usually a difficult concept for most people to grasp, so telling people that they have sometimes tens of thousands of different ancestral pathways leading to some of their individual ancestors almost always creates disbelief.

But this is not just a theory of mine. This is the picture that appears from digitally connecting the dots of 2,000+ years of ancestral history according to where the experts say those dots should be connected. Anyone who explores the Odyssey Edition of the A&E Family Forest will see countless examples of exactly how this happens.

What is still a theory of mine is that enough fully-sourced connections are in place in the new Odyssey Edition to produce 40-generation pedigree charts for some people with more than 1/100th of 1% of the boxes filled in. As insignificant as that tiny percent sounds, in this case it requires filling in at least 109,951,163 boxes with the names of one's ancestors.

As certain as I feel about this, I can't prove it yet because my combination of hardware and software quits counting just before it reaches 3.7 million boxes. Does anyone have the technology yet to confirm this theory?

Family Forest® - A People-Centered Approach to History®