Yesterday I read an article stating that a group of geneticists have found the mutation that causes people to have blue eyes. Apparently it traces to one common ancestor who seems to have lived in the Baltic region thousands of years back. So according to this study all blue-eyed people are distantly related.
This doesn't come as too big of a surprise to me since I started working on my genealogy. Families used to have so many children, and when one spouse died young, the survivor inevitably re-married and spawned some more. Not to mention all of the inter-family marriages. They say that something like 75% of the English middle class is descended from Edward III. While he hasn't come up in my family tree just yet, I have discovered that I'm possibly descended from Charlemagne at least three times over. There was a lot more information out on the internet than I would have suspected. People who have been working on their pedigrees for years have published their findings online and there is a lot of corresponding information. Of course, there is also a ton of conflicting info! Anything that seems too questionable to me I am leaving off. And of course it's all speculative, anyway. There are historical records to back up a lot of the info, but it isn't like people kept such careful track of what year things occured and a majority of records have been in some way lost or destroyed because either they thought no one would care, or because of war or just because sometimes things get lost. It's really only within the twentieth century that accurate records of births and deaths were kept by the states.
I only hope some record of my existence survives for a thousand years.
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