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Archiver > NORWAY > 1997-11 > 0878464141


From: Otto Jorgensen< >
Subject: Re: Cousins by the dozens
Date: Sun, 02 Nov 1997 09:49:01 GMT


On Sat, 1 Nov 1997 20:25:27 -0500 (EST), Barbara Rodgers
<> wrote:

|Neil,
| The marriages of cousins that you refer to cause what genealogists call
|pedigree collapse. If cousins never married, by 10 generations back you'd
|have 1,024 ancestors in that generation, and by 40 generations back you'd
|have roughly one trillion ancestors in that generation! (And that would
|probably only take you to AD 800!) Of course that's impossible, the
|population of earth gets smaller as we go back in time, therefore the
|farther back you go the more intermarriage of cousins there was.
| Most of us don't have to go back too far to find this. My husband's
|great-grandparents were first cousins, and both sets of my grandfather's
|grandparents were first cousins.
| There's a very nice discussion of this in a book called "Applied
|Genealogy" by Eugene A. Stratton. Instead of being a how-to book, it
|discusses a lot of things about genealogy I had never thought about before.
|But you're absolutely right, this happened everywhere on earth, not just in
|Årdal.
| Unfortunately, I don't know much about computers, but I am most intrigued
|by the "Forest" program you mentioned, and the relationship calculator. Is
|it for sale? There are so many intermarriages on my grandfather's tree,
|some between the likes of second cousins once removed, which puts some
|people in two or more generations! I've gone nuts trying to decide the
|closest relationship, etc.

The latest update (5.2f) is available from:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Brothers_Keeper/
have also relationship calculation
--
Otto Jorgensen - N-2020 Skedsmokorset - Norway
http://home.sol.no/~ojorgens/ e.mail:

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