It's more important where you go to than where you come from.
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
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Speak for yourself, i've gone back to 1200 CE and they all come from the same areas of the UK. My tree is a stick.
My great aunt's hobby for the past 40 years has been extended family geneology. Apparently before she started my (American) family thought we came from like two places, she's mucked that up and proved that we're total European mutts with at least 8 origin nations and also thrown at least one of the original supposed origins into question. She's found a slave-holder in our lineage, several failed homesteads in the pacific northwest, and multiple names on the monument at Ellis Island.
Sounds a lot like my 1st cousin twice removed. She and her mother used to go all over the country to court houses and libraries to get information and she self published her findings. Having been 101 in the early 2000s when she passed, she had some interesting stories. My favorites were the pranks that the young men in her home town would play. Like swapping the wheels on their wagon front for back on saturday night so when they went to church they were riding way up in the air, or dissassembling the outhouse and reassembling it upsidedown on the roof of the barn.
European mutts
That might be Czechs, the land has been traversed by countless nations in the past 2 millenia and the genetics reflect that. Still, racism is rampant... We did have Habsburg rulers, notably Rudolph II, but none of the major ones took advantage of the gene pool. Nowadays, there's lots of Ukrainians, Romani, Vietnamese and the current Head of Parliament is half-Japanese (the infamous anti-immigrant immigrant).
Man the industrial revolution sure has domesticated a lot of us huh? There's a reason why the automobile and trains were this huge deal. Not to mention jet travel.
No it was not easy or safe to leave your villages. And When people talk about lineage, it's usually, but not always the paternal side.
Next time you travel somewhere, I want you to think about how it might be different if you had to take a sail boat, horse, or walk there. How difficult would it be? And how safe would you feel carrying a backpack filled with everything you needed to live, trade, and barter? No cell phone, no pay phones.
Would you still live where you currently do? Could you see you and your descendents living in one place for generations if traveling meant there was a high potential for accidents, robbery, or just taking a big chunk of your time.
... isn't that the opposite of domestication, when it's suddenly easy to travel?
Domestication in my definition includes the removal if survival instincts. Particularly due to a loss of understanding of nature.
How is that related to knowing about your ancestry?
Repeat step one, otherwise...
Most of the world uses the country they were born in. I've noticed Americans will claim they're "from"a country they have ancestry in, even if they've literally never even been there.
"My great uncle's neighbor's dog was part Irish Setter."
"I'm 16/32 Irish, 8/32 German, and 8/32 Native American, so I've to hate the Brits, drink a lot, and gamble."
Due to two ancestors at unequal levels of generations back, I've got some odd ratio like 3/128 Native American. In practice this means that I don't grow much of a beard and I tan before I burn, and not much else.
Some people would do a lot to get those benefits!
* puts up hand *
I'd love the tanning easily trait! Never understood why the Nazis thought fair skinned people were the master race, an hour in summer sun and we're turning red and having to hide
TBF Germany used to have less summer. Global warming is a bitch!
Yeah, my sister lives in Bavaria and has been complaining about summers in the high 30s for a while now.
I live in Spain and have to hide for the summer :-/
While also shunning immigrants like lepers.
Sicilian Americans are crazy proud of their heritage... They neither speak Italian nor own passports.
I’m kind of upset the Habsburg’s reply is cut off
I just checked out his twitter and this guy is so funny. Wish he would be on Mastodon though.
Not many branches on that tree I suspect
There are, they’re just inosculated
Very jaw-dropping reply
Not gonna lie, eduard, having a lot of fun with his last name lately.
Who knew posting was an inheritable trait.
Back in the day it was a lot harder to move. People obviously did, but your great grandparents are about 80 years older then you. If you are are 40, then they might have been born in a time without planes and cars being pretty rarer. If you wanted to cross an ocean you took an ocean liner and most land travel was done on trains. Even those only became really big in the 1850s in many places in the Western world. Sure people moved, but it was somewhat rarer and a massive decision.
Also when 1 out of 16 did make a big move, then you still got a quite long history in that place.
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The unsettling thing about everyone's family tree is there a lot more incest than anyone would be comfortable with in it. The various royal families of the world just wrote it down.
It's not incest when you get to the point where overlapping lines are mathematically impossible
yeah, it's about 28 generations ago, if we assume a generation to be about 25 years, where the number of ancestors you would need to have for a family tree without overlaps becomes more than the number of people alive on earth at the time. 2^28^ is roughly the number of people alive on earth in the year 1326, which is 28×25 years ago. that's the theoretical limit of how far back you can go without someone fucking their cousin of some degree, and it requires an exceptionally well-traveled family
In reality, usually it's staying inside of a small village of maybe a few hundred. Easily within 10 generations, the entire village is related.
Reminds me of when I played Fallout Shelter, I made a spreadsheet to keep track of all my vault dwellers' families.
With the population of a tiny town, it did not take very long at all for the whole vault to become one clan.
I kept one dude and like 5 women in the family room to populate the entire vault, then I would kick out people that didn't have the same last name and then eventually kicked out all the males so it was just a 200 dweller vault of sisters
That sounds like a proper vault.
At some point back, you are related to every human who was on earth.
feddit.uk
Yeah, I can see that.
But seriously, how much "incest" does the average family tree really have? And I'm drawing the line at great-grandparents, anything less than that is unrelated imo.
Royals were doing multiple generations of first-degree incest, that's on a completely different level from normal people.
There's probably lots of first and second cousins who married in centuries past, though even most royals usually didn't do as much inbreeding as the extreme examples like the ancient Egyptians and Habsburgs. It became pretty common to look for spouses all over the continent, that's why so many of the european royal families are related in various ways; arguably that means that they were probably less inbred than the average villager in most cases.
Well the guy who got cut off in the screenshot has quite a bit
Like I said, royals aren't normal people. See the fabled family tree of the Ptolemaic dynasty:
But that only works if you have a family fortune to protect. Normal people would rather spread their children around and increase their chances of survival.
Holy shit!
So for example: Cleopatra II was first married to Ptolemy VI, her brother, and had a daughter Cleopatra III. Then when Ptolemy VI died Cleopatra II was married to Ptolemy VIII, her other brother. Ptolemy VIII also took his niece Cleopatra III as his second wife.
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Genealogy is just an exponential choose your own adventure where nearly every chosen path is the man. It's retconning an entirely narrow slice of your history based on whom you want association. It's Your Storyline Plinko.
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I don't really get this obsession some people have with their "origins". Like... why is it so important to trace your ancestors so you can say that a 3% of you is... idk... persian?
I just think it’s pretty cool. Geneology and the movement of populations is fascinating. My genetics are overwhelmingly from a particular part of the world, and it makes it interesting to read about history of that area and think, “Huh, so that’s something my ancestors went through.”
It’s not crucially important to know, and I haven’t sought out any DNA tests (I know what I know because a sibling took one.) It’s just interesting, especially to a nerd like me.
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Knowing from whence you came gives a psychological grounding, and a basis of confidence in one self. It's been shown to predict success in life.
Where you're born, and parental wealth may be much larger factors, they're not the end of the list. Learning about your family history is one of the things you can control yourself.
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