| I read a thought provoking article recently
in Missing Links: RootsWeb's Genealogy Journal.
It was about "pedigree collapse",
called "implexion", and connections to
Charlemagne. As fun as it is to speculate and
theorize, it is even more fun to try out
speculations and theories in real life. The
sum total of all the connections in the
Presidential Family Forest produces some amazing
maps of generation-by-generation pathways to the
past, and some lead from recent times to the
beginning of the previous millennium. So I
decided to find out how many different pathways
might lead from a real girl, Kathleen Staige
Davis who was born November 17, 1909 in
Baltimore, MD, back to Emperor Charlemagne who
was said to be born April 02, 742.
Although Progeny's Family Explorer seems
capable of producing, from the Presidential
database, a single pedigree chart (without using
the space saving feature "Cousin
Smart") leading from this century back to
Charlemagne, we will have to wait for some
quantum hardware advances to complete the task.
It takes approximately 40 generations for people
living today to reach back to Charlemagne, which
means more than one trillion boxes to fill in on
an individual's full pedigree chart. Having the
connections in place to fill in just 1/1,000 of
1% of a person's 40 generation pedigree chart
means the computer would need to fill in names in
ten million boxes on the same chart.
So I had to divide the task into three stages.
First, I did a ten generation ancestor view of
King Edward I "Longshanks" of England
(who lived 1239 to 1307, and was one of the main
figures in the movie "Braveheart")
which filled in over 572 boxes. Then I did 14-18
generation ancestor views of 66 of Longshanks'
ancestors (according to recorded history) to see
which ones led back to Charlemagne, and of those
who did, how many different times they lead to
Charlemagne (they ranged from 1 to 10 times
each).
When I totaled the results, I found that
within this database there are at least 154
different paths leading from Longshanks to
Charlemagne. Next I did a 28 generation ancestor
view of Kathleen Staige Davis (without
"Cousin Smart") and counted how many
times King Edward I "Longshanks" of
England appeared on her pedigree chart within the
11,402 boxes that had names filled in. It took
more than an hour to look through the chart, and
I found that Longshanks appeared at least 24
times.
This means that within this database, Kathleen
Staige Davis has at least 3,696 different paths
leading back to Emperor Charlemagne IF only the
paths that pass through King Edward I
"Longshanks" of England are counted.
If all of the other different paths that lead
through Longshanks' siblings and contemporaries
are counted, there could easily be an additional
15,000 paths between Kathleen Staige Davis and
Emperor Charlemagne.
Seeing so many of these digital pathways to
the past visually displayed can alter perceptions
and conceptions about how each of us is
descended, and how connected we actually are to
so much of what has gone before.
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