SOME FAMILY
THE MORMONS and HOW HUMANITY KEEPS TRACK OF ITSELF
by Donald Harman Akenson C 2007
Published by McGill-Queen's University Press - Montreal and Kingston
A fascinating book which asks the question, is the Latter Day Saint's religious view of family that so inspires their genealogical research and world effort to collect data on humans who once lived.
As a genealogist, I've become aware that some of the records one find have been previously submitted by Latter Day Saints have not been proofed, that there are errors. However, as I understand it, most people only go back to their great grandparents, and frankly, for most people going back much further can be extremely taxing if not impossible, depending on exactly where those people were living. (For instance if your heritage is from Jewish London you may be able to go much further back. If your ancestry is English or German you may also be able to go much further back.)
So here are some excerpts from this boom that I found quite telling.
page 7-8) On the dimensions of the collective project LDS members are working on (For which they have already collected 2 billion names.)
"The world records for fecundity are the more than 1,400 progeny sired by Moulay Ismail, an eighteenth-century emperor of Morocco, and on the female side, the 69 children of Fedora Vassilyex, an eighteenth century Russian woman.) This if the Mormons are going to make a world pedigree, it would seem they have their work cut out for them....What saves their task from being completely inconceivable is the simple fact that human beings interbreed quite promiscuously. Not just third cousins, or second, but first cousins, uncles and nieces, brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters, nephews and aunts, wives and brothers in law, and on and on. Most of the closest inbreeding are covered up by social convention and by skilled lying. Unless your parents come from totally separate populations (say from Africa and from China), you would not have to go back many generations to find some of your mother's people procreating with your father's - would not, that is, if the records were compete and accurate, which they are not.... Whether or not one likes this basic fact of frequent human inbreeding, it provides a valuable set of advantages for genealogists and geneticists. It means, first, that nay individual will have a lot fewer distinct genealogical lines to trace than if there had been no inbreeding.... the limited original population from which we all stem means that we are all interrelated; and, if there were a full genealogy of every human being, we would discover that not only are we all related, but that our ancestors intersected with each other several times in a great genetic tangle.
More excerpts coming...
By the way, I think most genealogists know this. After all this is what is behind all the web sites you see in which some celebrity is connected through some line (could be one of 64 or more) to a royal personage.
