Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Jason Scott asks Have you traced your family genealogy and traveled to the destination where they are from?I’ve spent a lot of time on ancestry.com, which has a lot of resources. I’ve been able to trace all but two my ancestors back five generations. That would be my great-great-great-great grandparents. They mostly came from Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. However, I have one great-great grandmother that had a totally different ancestry. Her ancestors were largely English and Scottish. Some of her ancestors were very early arrivals living in the Plymouth Colony in Massachuttes. Through her lineage, I’ve been able to link myself to King Robert II of Scotland. He is my 20th great-grandfather. That might sound impressive, but it really isn’t. When you go back 20 generations, you have 2^20 ancestors from just that generation or 1,048,576 ancestors.

Going the other way, King Robert II probably has millions, if not tens of millions, descendants. For the majority of my ancestors, there is a huge black hole of information around the time of the 30 years’ war which ravaged northern Europe. Many churches were burned, and the birth, death, and marriage records were all destroyed with them.