“We Are All One Family” – Richard Seltzer
Our prolific classmate, Richard Selzer, has done It again – by publishing his newest book last month, One Family. This one is very different from his other books, many of which have been profiled in these pages. This is not a novel; it’s an exploration, a meditation on the nature of human connectedness.
The book starts with a mind-blowing thought experiment (and proof) that, if you have European ancestry, it’s likely that you are related to every other person with European ancestry on Earth today. We are indeed … ONE FAMILY.
His argument is so concise and beautifully laid out that, with the author’s permission, I am including a 650-word excerpt in the PS below. I think his conclusion is unassailable. We are all one family. A longer excerpt that extends those 650 words is available on Medium.
Richard uses his own family to make some of his points. In her early adulthood, Richard’s mom, an orphan, approached Estes Kefauver, the Democratic Senator from Tennessee and Adlai Stevenson’s running mate 1956. Her maiden name was Estes, and her dad had been from Tennessee. It turns out that Kefauver was aware of an extensive genealogical study done on the families, and Richard’s mom was indeed related. She then built on that work.
Richard confesses “I always had an itch to learn about my ancestors.” He did a lot of his own work, and “became addicted, following more and more lines, further and further back.”
Richard was an early “Internet Evangelist” for Digital Equipment Corporation. See his January 1994 preso “glimpse of the future”. Richard used those internet skills to do research “Ancestor surfing came naturally to me,” he said.
The book takes the reader on a journey not only of Richard’s family, but many phenomena that he unearths, including conversions and assimilations confounding questions about ancestry with the nature of historical truth and truth in general. He even explores the wild, mostly unspoken truths of who fathers really might be. (Did you know that feudal lords often had the right to deflower brides in their realms on wedding nights (“the right of first night”). How many firstborns were secretly of noble ancestry, not sharing the blood of their serf “fathers?”)
Anyway, it’s a fun read. For your reading pleasure (and any feedback or discussion), Richard has generously made the .pdf of the galley proofs available here for your personal, non-commercial use. Enjoy!
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Why Should You Care About My Family?
You have two biological parents, four grandparents. The number of your ancestors doubles with each generation. That means you don’t need to believe in Adam and Eve to conclude we’re all related. Each of us could have had a quadrillion ancestors in the year 550. That’s two to the power of 50: one followed by 15 zeros, or a million billion. If it took a second to count each number, it would take 31,688 1Our Common Ancestry million years for you to count to a quadrillion. But historians estimate that only about two hundred million people were alive at that time. What happened to your other ancestors?
Until a hundred years ago, most people lived in rural areas and seldom traveled. Families stayed in the same spot for generations. They had little contact with people in other towns, much less other countries. Unless a catastrophe — like war, plague, or famine — forced them to move and mate with strangers, they married among themselves, and everyone in a town was related. “You can be, and in fact are, descended from the same individual many times over,” says Adam Rutherford in A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: the Human Story Retold Through Our Genes. “Your great-great- great-great-great-grandmother might hold that position in your family tree twice, or many times, as her lines of descent branch out from her, but collapse onto you… Our family trees are not trees at all, but entangled meshes” (pp. 162-163).
But, even blunted by interbreeding, the effect of doubling is so powerful that Rutherford believes “with absolute confidence” that if you’re of European extraction, you are descended from Charlemagne, the eighth-century Holy Roman Emperor. [Emphasis added by Editor] You are also descended from millions of other people who lived then. The general statement, based on analysis of DNA, is that 80 percent of adult Europeans alive back then had offspring who had offspring through all the generations to today, and that every one of them is an ancestor of everyone of European descent who is alive today. (See https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/charlemagnes- dna-and-our-universal-royalty)
Another statistical model, goes even further, determining that every person on Earth is at least a fiftieth cousin of everyone else (International Society of Genetic Genealogy). As Rutherford says, “It might seem that a remote tribe would have been isolated from others for centuries in, for example, the Amazon. But no one is isolated indefinitely.”
My family is your family. I happen to have found the names and dates of some of our massively numerous shared ancestors. You can and should take pride in these connections, as I do.
Our ancestors include rulers of almost every country in Europe, plus Holy Roman Emperors, Byzantine Emperors, princes of Kiev, Viking chieftains, William “the Conqueror,” King John (of Robin Hood and Magna Carta fame), King Alfred “the Great,” and King Robert the Bruce of Scotland (who you know from the movie Braveheart). Charlemagne appears 42 generations back. (That reminds me of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the number 42 is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.)
Our beliefs shape how we see ourselves and how we live our lives. What difference would it make if you knew your ancestors shaped the course of history? What difference would it make to your children if they knew that they are special in that way? How would you feel about the world and its future, if you knew you had such forebears and may have such descendants?
There are over 1600 direct ancestors listed in the Appendix at the end of this book. Whoever you are, even if you don’t know the names of your great-grandparents, if you are of European descent, some part of this family tree is yours. And if you have children and your children 3Our Common Ancestry have children for about 35 generations, a thousand years from now everyone alive on Earth, and on planets colonized by Earth, will be your descendant.
We’re all one family.