Through Ancestry.com you can search through your ancestors. It's an enormous Mormon-inspired vehicle that helps you track down people that shared some of your lineage. Most people don't have anyone in their past with any relevance to general history, apparently. However, I am practically the demented dwarf nephew of the giants in my immediate past. All of these people are from my mother's father's side: a man named John Richard Wilson, who lived in Iowa. Many of the intervening people on his side were newspaper editors and teachers at high schools and colleges. Not famous, but most of them can be looked up and there are still lots of articles you can find. A few were more obscure farmers or pastors. The following people are somewhat more momentous.
Mayflower Passenger
John Alden came to America on the Mayflower and signed the Mayflower Compact. He was one of the first settlers of Duxborough which today is called Duxbury, Massachusetts.
Relationship: 7th Great Grandfather
Franklin Pierce (1804-1869)
14th President of the United States of America
A strong background in law, military service and politics brought Franklin Pierce to the presidency of the United States in 1853. During his term the Kansas-Nebraska Act was enacted and the Gadsden Purchase, 45,535 miles of land, bought what now makes up the southernmost area of New Mexico and Arizona.
Relationship: 4th Cousin 4 times removed
Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison (1775-1864)
First Lady
Though her husband only served as president for 1 month, Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison was nominally the First Lady of the United States. The couple never entered the White House.
Relationship: 3rd Cousin 6 times removed
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
American Author
Physician, Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote the famous poem "Old Ironsides" about a U.S. naval ship. The ship later was made a monument; he also coined the word "anesthesia."
Relationship: 5th Cousin 3 times removed
Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950)
American Writer
Edgar Lee Masters is the author of several biographies, books of poetry, plays and novels. His most famous work is "Spoon River Anthology" which was inspired by his experiences growing up in Illinois.
Relationship: 6th Cousin 2 times removed
Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400)
English Author
Often called the father of English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer was an English author, poet, and courtier known especially for his "Canterbury Tales".
Relationship: 15th Great Grandfather
Edward Winslow (1595-1655)
Mayflower Passenger
Edward Winslow served as the governor of the Plymouth Colony. He also signed the Mayflower Compact.
Relationship: 7th Great Grand Uncle
Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919)
American Activist and Surgeon
Dr. Mary Edwards Walker was a feminist Union surgeon. She was given a Medal of Honor after the Civil War for her bravery as a prisoner of war, making her the only woman to have received this medal.
Relationship: 4th Cousin 2 times removed
Jane Means Appleton Pierce (1806-1863)
First Lady
Jane Means Appleton Pierce was an American First Lady and the wife of President Franklin Pierce. The social obligations of First Lady were a constant struggle for her, but she found solace in her close friends.
Relationship: 4th Cousin 3 times removed
William Whipple (1730-1785)
New Hampshire Representative
A merchant and Brigadier General in the New Hampshire Militia, William Whipple Jr. signed the Declaration of Independence as a representative of New Hampshire.
Relationship: 3rd Cousin 5 times removed
Samuel Adams (1722-1803)
Massachusetts Representative
Samuel Adams helped to organize the Boston Tea Party. From the beginning he was a loud voice for independence.
Relationship: 3rd Cousin 5 times removed
Samuel Morse (1791-1872)
American Inventor
Samuel Morse invented the signaling alphabet known as Morse Code to be used in his electromagnetic telegraph.
Relationship: 4th Cousin 3 times removed
Richard Bedford Bennett (1870-1947)
Former Prime Minister
Richard Bedford Bennett was the first Canadian Prime Minister to be a member of the House of Lords.
Relationship: 6th Cousin
John Locke (1632-1704)
English philosopher
John Locke is considered one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers. His philosophical writings include "An Essay concerning Human Understanding."
Relationship: 2nd Cousin 8 times removed
Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822-1893)
19th President of the United States of America
Rutherford B. Hayes was known for his honesty and military involvement in the American Civil War. After the scandal ridden years of the Grant administration, Hayes restored trust to the presidency and ended Reconstruction during his term.
Relationship: 5th Cousin 2 times removed
Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910)
Religious Leader
Mary Baker Eddy was an influential American author, teacher, and religious leader, noted for her groundbreaking ideas about spirituality and health, which she named "Christian Science." She articulated those ideas in her major work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, first published in 1875. Four years later she founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts, which today has branch churches and societies around the world. In 1908 she launched The Christian Science Monitor, a leading international newspaper, the recipient, to date, of seven Pulitzer Prizes.
Relationship: 5th Cousin 2 times removed
William Howard Taft (1857-1930)
27th President of the United States of America
Taft, serving first as President then as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, is the only president to be the head of both the Executive and Judicial branches of government. He was the first president to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Relationship: 5th Cousin 2 times removed
John Parker (1729-1775)
Revolutionary War Hero
John Parker commanded the Massachusetts militia at the Battle of Lexington and Concord. He did so while suffering from Tuberculosis; he died shortly after this battle.
Relationship: 3rd Cousin 6 times removed
John Trumbull (1756-1843)
American soldier, diplomat, author, painter
After a military career aiding George Washington, John Trumbull went abroad to paint. His skill as an artist went largely unnoticed until the U.S. Senate commissioned him to paint 4 war paintings which now hang in the U.S. Capitol. He went on to be president of the American Academy of Fine Art.
Relationship: 4th Cousin 4 times removed
Lucille Ball (1911-1989)
American Actress and Comedian
Lucille Desiree Ball was the comedic star of the 1950s TV show I Love Lucy. Often called, "The Queen of Comedy," Ball has acted in Broadway productions, motion pictures, and TV shows.
Relationship: 6th Cousin 1 times removed
Show relationships
E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)
American Poet
Edward Estlin Cummings' use of unconventional punctuation, syntax, and layout distinguish his poetry. His avant-garde style is still popular and influential today.
Relationship: 6th Cousin 1 times removed
George Eastman (1854-1932)
American Inventor
George Eastman founded the Eastman Kodak Co. and invented roll film. His invention was also a precursor for motion picture film.
Relationship: 5th Cousin 3 times removed
Julia Child (1912-2004)
American Gourmet Chef
American chef Julia Child introduced French cuisine to America through her many cookbooks and television shows.
Relationship: 6th Cousin 1 times removed
Winslow Homer (1836-1910)
American Painter
Famous for painting landscapes and his engravings, Winslow Homer was an American artist during the Civil War Era. Homer's subject matter was often pastoral and depicted the farms and landscapes of the United States.
Relationship: 6th Cousin 2 times removed
Grace Anna Goodhue Coolidge (1879-1957)
First Lady
Grace Goodhue Coolidge was a strong support to her husband, Calvin Coolidge, during his rise in politics. Her extroverted friendliness brought balance to his shyness.
Relationship: 7th Cousin
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
English Author
D.H. Lawrence was a prolific and controversial writer. His novels include "Women in Love" and "Sons and Lovers".
Relationship: 5th Cousin 4 times removed
Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957)
American Actor
In 1999, the American Film Institute named Humphrey DeForest Bogart the "Greatest Male Star of All Time". Bogart played in such movies as "The Maltese Falcon", "The Big Sleep", "Casablanca", and "The Caine Mutiny".
Relationship: 7th Cousin
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
American Author
Spending 2 years "living simply" in the forest was the premise for Henry David Thoreau's famous book, "Walden". Thoreau also wrote "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience", an essay that encouraged people to prohibit governments from having absolute power.
Relationship: 6th Cousin 2 times removed
Desi Arnaz (1917-1986)
Cuban American Performer
Desiderio Alberto Arnaz was a Cuban-American musician, comedian, and actor. He performed with his wife, Lucille Ball, for several years before their divorce.
Relationship: 6th Cousin 3 times removed
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
American-born British Poet
Nobel prize winning poet T.S. Eliot is considered one of the most significant poets of the twentieth century. His most famous works are "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land".
Relationship: 7th Cousin 1 times removed
Robert Graves (1895-1985)
English Author
English scholar, poet, and novelist; Robert Graves produced over 140 works. His famous works include The Long Week-End.
Relationship: 9th Cousin
Florence Nightingale (1820-1910)
Pioneer of Modern Nursing
Florence Nightingale, sometimes called "The Lady with the Lamp", was born in Italy in a wealthy British family. She instigated new ways of caring for soldiers during her work in the Crimean war and throughout her career.
Relationship: 8th Cousin 2 times removed
Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson (1748-1782)
First Lady
Martha Jefferson was married to U.S. President Thomas Jefferson. She died before her husband became president, so she was never formally given the title of First Lady.
Relationship: 8th Cousin 3 times removed
Bob Hope (1903-2003)
American Actor
British-born American actor Leslie Townes Hope, better known as Bob Hope, was best known for his role in "My Favorite Brunette" and other radio and TV appearances.
Relationship: 10th Cousin 1 times removed
11 comments:
Kirby,
Have you looked at your academic ancestry? Mine goes through some of the usual suspects (for an American mathematician), EH Moore, Euler, Leibnitz. It's interesting though to see it twist through different disciplines as you go back in time. So, for example, I pick up Christiaan Huygens at the transition from Astronomy/Physics to Math, and more surprisingly (especially for a Lutheran), Desiderius Erasmus and Rudolf Agricola.
It would not surprise me if our lines merged somewhere in there.
Stu, do you mean these were relatives of yours?
As you can see, my ancestry tends toward writers, and there are not any scientists unless you include Samuel Morse -- who invented Morse code.
This part of the tree was done by a friend of mine from high school named Kathy Plum -- who teaches mathematics at a community college out in California.
I can't afford the entry fee at Ancestry.com which runs about 15 dollars for a month.
You can do simple work through it without paying, but to get the details you have to pony up the 15 a month.
The problem for me is that I'm doing so much other research I wouldn't be able to take advantage of it.
Euler and others! It's neat to see how people's temperament runs.
All my folks at least in that lineage of my mom's dad are either poets, comedians, writers, or a few statesmen and religious personnel.
No major mathematicians, that's for certain. At least none that made a splash like Euler.
I wonder to what extent such traints run in families, and aren't a matter of the nurture that Locke claimed (Locke was an ancestor and it doesn't surprise me).
I'd be incredibly surprised to find someone like Euler in my lineage.
There are three other lines to investigate, but they are going to be harder to trace I think. My mother's mother's father was a man named John Johnson who came from Sweden, and worked in a factory in Moline, Illinois. He didn't like his family, and didn't keep in touch with them.
But they had lived in Chicago.
So perhaps there's a link there somewhere.
Then there's my father's side. His dad was a Norwegian farmer who died when my dad was only two. That side of the family never spoke to my father, and tried to cut my father's mother out of the will (she had been his maid).
She was herself French and Roumanian, with perhaps some Cherokee Indian mail-order bride or another.
Very much harder to trace people who aren't used to writing and keeping records of themselves. My dad had no interest at all in that kind of thing, even though he did have a Ph.D. in Physical Education, and was himself a college math teacher.
My dad almost never talked about his background. He was almost entirely interested in sports, a subject that I don't find worthy of discussion especially when it comes down to who scored what.
I AM interested in beautiful over the shoulder catches by an outfielder, or an amazing broken field run in football, or even the graceful dancing of boxers like Ali.
But I could care less about the quantitative side of the sports realm.
Kirby,
do you mean these were relatives of yours?
No, the academic ancestry (for those of us with Ph.D.'s and such) comes from tracing back the intellectual relationship of advisor, rather than the biological relationship. So, Steve Shaviro (if I understand correctly) would count as your "father" in this scheme.
I've done a bit of genealogy, and have used Ancestor.com and similar resources.
BTW, Moline probably means Caterpillar or one of its suppliers.
Shaviro's intellectual heroes are mainly French: Deleuze, Foucault, Nietzsche, Hume. I don't think he likes much before the Enlightenment. He thinks of himself as an actual Marxist.
I kid you not.
His parents I believe were both college professors and I think their specialty was economics. They are also interested in musical history, I think I heard.
Shaviro helped me enormously with my work on Pierre Klossowski.
His early work was in Romantic poetry: especially Shelley and Blake.
It's funny, I think that ultimately our real connection was The Burnt Orange Heresy by charles Willeford. He gave me that book and it ended up batting clean-up in my first book.
My other profs -- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, and Marc Froment-Meurice, were both French guys. Derrida, Lacan, and others, were their interests. Mikkel hated them all, though. He writes AGAINST Freud in his books. And he comes to some extent out of the Situationists.
I think I threw all this stuff out after a while, and got started again with Locke, Luther, and others, who seemed on a sounder footing.
Now I'm reading Robert Nozick.
I doubt if any of my profs would ever read someone like Patrick Buchanan.
Buchanan however is quite sensible.
charles willeford's Burnt Orange Heresy is a thriller of sorts about a Duchampian art critic in Florida. It's a hilarious send-up of the art world, and yet is also a thug's game. It was Willeford's only serious novel. Willeford taught Philosophy at Miami-Dade community college.
I love the book and still think about it.
When the book appeared (Comedy after Postmodernism: rereading Comedy from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford), Willeford's widow got in touch with me.
She couldn't understand the essay very well because I was using JF Lyotard's theories against Willeford's narrative.
ultimately, I might be the only person who understands that essay.
I wonder if anyone else has read both Willeford and Lyotard except for me and Shaviro.
And I wonder if he ever read my essay. If he did, he never mentioned it.
Kirby,
Relationship: 10th Cousin 1 times removed
I love it! I hadn't noticed this before, but it seems that you name relationships the same way I do. Suffice it say, my wife doesn't :-).
So anyway, let me apply just a bit of math to this, just for kicks. Just a bit. What this relationship means is that your most recent known common ancestor is 11 generations removed from one of you, and 12 from the other. [Think about it -- first cousins share grandparents, hence, two generations, so the difference is one.]
Now I've just read a pile of Luther's writing on marriage for diakonia, and he uses the different notion of "degrees of consanguinity," which basically means the number of parent/child edges in the relationship graph you have to traverse to get from one person to the other. This is actually useful in this context, because it means that you are separated from this individual by 23 = 11+12 degrees of consanguinity. This is relevant because you'll share half of your genome with folks who are one degree of consanguinity apart from you. So the expectation here is that you share 2^-23 * 46 chromosomes with this individual. That's 46 over roughly 8 million, which is zero to six decimal places.
To put this a less mathematically, anyone who is 8 or more degrees of consanguinity away from you probably shares no chromosomes with you at all, and so is effectively unrelated biologically.
The one caveat to this is, of course, ribosomal DNA, which is passed purely down the maternal line. Thus, you probably share no nuclear chromosomes in common with your grant^8th grand mother, but you do have her ribosomal DNA.
Ain't biology fun?
The most recent, ironically or not, isn't by any stretch the closest, because our common ancestor must be many generations back, and then since we split, there is almost no commonality.
I didn't name the thing, and don't yet know how the different removes and cousinlinesses work.
I'd assume that a direct great grandfather like John Alden would be closer than a second cousin, 8 times removed.
I don't really have the chart yet. Remember, all this is being done for me by someone else.
And even then it's just one of four grandparents.
And even within that there are problems with the actual denizens of the chart. Franklin Pierce for instance didn't care one way or the other about slavery, and was a pen pal of Jefferson Davis DURING the Civil War.
They found his letters when Davis was captured, and he was egging on the enemy!
Or so one story goes.
Who knows. Most of reality, or what we think of as reality, is just one pile of fictions laid on top of another pile of fictions.
Which isn't to say that Im not more closely related to this pile of people than to a bunch of folks from Japan.
But I haven't really figured out the proximity or what the eight times removed even quite means.
This document wasn't prepared by me, and is simply a cut and splice of what was sent.
The most interesting ancestor in a sense is the feminist spy -- Walker. I ordered a book on her today from Amazon.com. She refused to wear women's clothes and was arrested on several occasions for impersonating a man.
I bought a book about her today. There are a half a dozen about her, and several by her, still more or less in print.
It will be fun to have my chart all filled in at some point back to the baboons.
Kirby,
I didn't name the thing, and don't yet know how the different removes and cousinlinesses work.
Oh, so I share the same naming convention with your source, which I guess is ancestor.com. This isn't as much fun, because I don't like to admit any clues to the Mormons, but let me explain anyway.
From a mathematical point of view, your brothers and sisters are zero-th cousins. The nearest ancestor are your parents, one generation away. Ordinary cousins you get. "Second cousin" describes the relationship between children of first cousins, i.e., their closest common ancestors are great-grandparents, three generations removed from each. And "third cousins" describes the relationship between children of second cousins, whose closest common ancestors are great-great-grandparents, four generations removed from each, etc.
The removedness thing comes in describing individuals who are in different generations. For example, the child of my cousin would be a first cousin, once removed. Their child would be my first cousin, twice removed, etc.
I hope this helps...
My ancestors on my father's side date back to the 17th Century in New England. One fellow wrote a pamphlet against the persecution of witches. My real father's name was Calef.
My mom's people were Scandanavian, from Norway I believe.
I tried tracing them several years ago, without much luck. If you don't have, say, your great-grandparents' names, it's tough searching.
i think you're making up that shit about john locke, dude
or is that
making that shit up
jh
Bottom line, Kirby, we're all related.
My wife's 30th cousin 15 times removed is Einstein.
Even Shakespeare and I share the same human blood.
It's a miracle!
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