Two updates and a thought

[oursin]

Went and got my (paid-for) booster vax this pm, a little more stressful than it might have been since I am no longer entirely au fait with the bus routes and got the one that doesn't go straight down the main road but veers off, fortunately I had allowed myself rather a lot of travel time.

***

By dint of downloading an entirely different bit of software, it now seems possible to play dvds from the optical drive.

***

There was a discussion somewhere on the site formerly known as Twitter about how many ancestors people would have had not really all that many generations back, and via a detour by way of the Habsburgs (who had a very limited number of ancestors indeed), somebody claimed that, well, actually, In The Past most people would not have ever gone more than 20 miles max from their birthplace and the gene-pool would consequently have been limited and there would have thus been a lot of doubling up on that family tree.

And I thought, hmmm, wait, were people just sticking around Ye Olde Village all their lives, remembering something I came across about young women walking all the way from Shropshire to the Home Counties to do seasonal fruit-picking labour in - I think it was the C18th but I don't see why it couldn't have been going on for longer.

And driving the sheep and cattle and geese and assorted livestock to market over often quite long distances.

And what about, thinking back to Ye Medeevles, folk gowen on pilgrimage?

Quite apart from war and similar upheavals.

But even if people sat stock still in the same place all their lives, there were other people who were traveling through - is there not a whole genre of sad ballad which is about itinerant bloke who beguiles the local girl and then sods off? I suspect in actuality she did not chuck herself in the millrace, and the resultant sprog was a contribution to mixing up the gene-pool.

Comments

[redbird]

There is definitely doubling up, but not (or not only) because people stayed close to home. The most recent ancestor of everyone alive today almost certainly lived in the last few thousand years. The Scientific American article I just found uses the examples that everyone of European ancestry is descended from Charlemagne, and all Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews have at least one ancestor who was expelled from Spain in 1492.

[ethelmay]

Also people travel in waves. In my genealogy there are two families that had intermarriages both in Ireland and in the US, because members of both families came over at the same time to the same areas. Some of my current Norwegian and Irish relatives seem to be more closely related to me genetically than one would predict, and I think it's partly due to cousin marriages after my ancestors left, if you see what I mean.

[kore]

"in actuality she did not chuck herself in the millrace, and the resultant sprog was a contribution to mixing up the gene-pool."

I love this.

[ranunculus]

The theory that people sat around in their villages and didn't travel has been pretty comprehensively debunked.
DNA testing of bones from graves show that there was indeed a LOT of movement of people. Grave goods in the Orkneys, Shetlands and Ireland not to mention Scotland and England show much trade between those places in the Neolithic, plus trade with the Continent.
Ideas about gardens and structures in them traveled all over North Africa, into Spain, Turkey and into Mesopotamia in pre-historic times. Check out Monte Don's two part series on "Paradise Gardens" on Acorn for some of the garden information.
There was a huge trade from Norway down the Volga River during Viking times. Archaeologists have found coins and trade goods all the way to the Caspian Sea. Lots of Norse DNA ended up in England, and our vision of the Norse as purely raiders, is being radically revised to show there was a great deal of trade and emigration as well as some raids.
Then, of course, there was the Silk Road to China, branches of which as far as Europe and Egypt. There was the transfer of Buddhism between India and China.
None of these mention the migration of peoples during the ice ages, some of them ended up in America! How about the Roman soldiers who were intentionally posted far from their native lands by the Roman Empire? How about the Moors in Spain?

[lokifan]

Yes, exactly!

[silveradept]

Hooray for boosters and being able to play optical discs again.

Travel certainly was a thing that happened all over time, even if only for all the university students and the women who might be in a university town to collect an Mrs. degree, should there have been many of them. And then those people would be posted wherever they might find work, and so forth. As soon as someone has foot power or greater, there will be movement to new places and the corresponding gene mixing.

[kotturinn]

One of my great-grandfathers had moved from Poland to England via Denmark by the time he was in his 20s. Another branch, admittedly in fishing, in 3 generations went from Sussex to Yorkshire via East Anglia. All 19th century. I doubt we're unique!

[oursin]

An ancestor of my mother's (grandfather? great-grandfather? I'm not up to working out the generations this evening) went out to Russia to build textile mill machinery in the mid-C19th, though I think he took the wife he had already wed back in Lancashire with him.

(Though the potential for transnational mobility of mid-Victorian engineers is a feature in Little Dorritt with Daniel Doyce.)

[mrissa]

I mean...most of the doubling up is really not at the great-grandparent level, also. People like my grandmother, my mother, and me were in charge of making sure that people weren't breeding their cows too closely together but also their children. It only seems like the way that we know everything about everyone's second cousins is useless because we live in a modern society; it used to be incredibly useful if young Whatsit helped take the wool to the market with her Far and came back chattering of the boy she'd met there and us aunties could say, "Lars Larsson from Bernfjord, oh yes, that's Helga's boy, that's your cousin Lars!" and watch her blanch and then be a bit chilly to him the next time they met.

I am always just knocked over when people treat great-grandparents as though they're incomprehensibly far away, when they're people like Pearl and Emilia and Lars and Russ whose favorite flavors of ice cream I remember.

[oursin]

It sometimes seemed that half or more of the town where I was born was related to my father, his father having been one of 13 and his mother one of 12 - they had 3 kids, historical demography illustrated! - and yes, there was a knowledge of cousins/second cousins/great-aunts, etc. And that was a seaside town/Channel port. (There was also a military camp not far outside the town.) However, both my father, and his sister, married out as it were - Dad to an incomer from Lancashire, and his sister to a Welshman that I think she met when they were evacuated to Wales.

[arkessian]

My brother-in-law can knock on doors all over the Black Country and meet cousins,nieces and nephews etc. He's the youngest of (I think) 14; his mother and father were one of 15 and 16. It's his hobby. My sister tracks them down and then they go visit out of the blue... And are inevitably greeeted with: you're Kevin! (He's albino, which makes identification simple).

[flemmings]

A generational keep-tracking person is useful, yes. Like two of my French relatives who met in a bar, got to flirting, and only figured out the connection because gosh both of them turned out to have Canadian cousins, and both sets of cousins had cottages, and both cottages were on Lake Erie at a place called Camelot Beach, at which they realized cottages and cousins were both the same.

[kotturinn]

I think it partly depends on when generations lived, and also how close families are. I didn't know my grandparents. Both my grandfathers were dead before I was born, the Yorkshire grandmother died before I was 5, the London grandmother we rarely saw and she died before I was a teenager, plus she had dementia.

My parents rarely talked about relatives - family histories of deep divisions. Two of my Yorkshire grandfather's siblings moved to Lancashire to get away from their father and another went to Australia! What I know comes from my sister who has taken to delving into the family tree(s).

[azara1]

That can vary enormously depending on the age gap between generations: in my case, later age of marriage and long-tailed families meant around 30 years of a gap. One of my grandfathers lived into his eighties and still died before I was born in the late 1950s, the other died in his 40s back in 1936. I only remember one of my grandmothers clearly. So the great-grandparents who died more than 100 years ago do seem very far away.

[ethelmay]

I do seem to recall that there's evidence of people's families having been in a particular place since Domesday Book, as Kipling says - or longer, as in the case of some bog body who proved to be almost certainly related to people in the village near where he was found. But of course that doesn't mean everyone stayed, or that no one came to them.

[oursin]

Or that they didn't go away for a bit and then come back!

[azara1]

Here in Ireland people are very conscious of a history of emigration, but the public narrative tends to ignore the extent to which people came back. Emigration from the poorer rural counties was mostly to the US, and that certainly tended to be permanent, but people from the east coast towns and counties often went to Britain, and very often came back. So I have: one ancestral line where the father was a weaver, living in Kilmarnock and Salford before returning to Dublin; a grandmother born in Liverpool but spending a lot of time with her grandparents in Louth; one great-great-grandfather who sailed the world as a sailmaker; another who was in the British Army and returned to Ireland with a Cornish wife.

Again, the public narrative tends to ignore quite how many Irish people were involved in the whole Imperial project, between Irish regiments who fought for the Empire, middle class administrators in India and elsewhere, and naval personnel from ports like Queenstown/Cobh. After independence, all that history was quietly ditched or even lied about. My mother was told her great-grandfather was a lighthouse keeper, and that was why her grandfather remembered a childhood in Nova Scotia and other places - the family didn't want to admit that he'd been a soldier in the British Army.

[oursin]

When I was starting out in my archival career, I became very well acquainted with the records of the EIC and there was a substantial run of recruitment rolls for Ireland, pre 1858 - for one thing, the Company paid better than the British Army.

Also, one of Kipling's 'Soldiers Three' is definitely Irish (the others, as I recall, are Yorkshire and Cockney).

[azara1]

I was interested to find out that Trinity College Dublin actually had an Indian Civil Service School in the 19th century, and taught courses in Indian history and law, as well as languages including Sanskrit, Hindustani, Gujarati and Telegu. Large numbers of Irish graduates apparently got positions in the Indian Geological Survey and Indian Medical Service as well as in the main Indian Civil Service.

I think Kipling's most famous Irish character is actually Kim!

[antisoppist]

On one side of my family four siblings married another three siblings. It wasn't that they all stayed at home because two of the sons left Cambridgeshire and set up a horse feed business in London but once one of them married a daughter of the other family, it seems like they all did. Indeed my grandfather (illegally) married two of the sisters. So although they were fairly adventurous geographically, they weren't matrimonially. One lot were shopkeepers and the other teachers. Did they not know anyone else in a compatible social class? Or did they just all really get on? Even with the dead wife's (younger) sister thing which they must all have known about.

[ethelmay]

Laura Ingalls Wilder's family was like that. Lots of double cousins.

[kathmandu]

I recall in one of the Worrals books, they took part in the annual driving of the sheep from the northern mountains of France, all the way south to the Mediterranean coast. That book was set in WW2, but it was a 'since time out of mind' tradition to drive the sheep, and that meant the shepherd families also went south to the coast Mediterranean every winter.

[em_h]

My great-grandfather *was* the itinerant bloke. I and one of his other descendants encountered each other on Ancestry, and we are still tracking down all his adventures through Britain ...