So to celebrate, I invited my ward to join a Relative Finder group. (Side note: email works way better for this than Facebook, especially an email Sunday night.) The relatives started flowing in, and each time I checked there were a half dozen more people I was related to. Mostly 9th and 10th and 11th cousins. (Which . . . I don't really count that as related. If our common ancestor was born before 1600, then we have about 0% of the same genetic material.) But there were 8th, 7th, 6th, 5th, and even 4th cousins I discovered, which was really fun.
There were also a few funny observations I made as things progressed:
- The person I'm most closely related to in the ward is . . . Kevin. I figured that. It's pretty hard to be more related than third half cousins once removed. (Common ancestor was born in 1819, so it's really not that weird, guys.) (Incidentally, we are also 9th cousins 4 times removed on my mom's side, which barely counts.)
- But I had a few friends who discovered third cousins they didn't know about (both times a guy was third cousins with a girl). In an alternate universe, had they gotten married to this third cousin instead, I wonder when they would have figured it out. I can just imagine the family-history aunt (every Mormon has one) at their wedding reception collecting maiden names from the grandparents and making the awkward connections. Makes me glad Kevin and I figured it out within two minutes of meeting.
link - Besides us, the most closely related couple I know of are 5th cousins with each other.
- Random, but I have an Armenian friend who said once that in Armenian culture if any man and woman knew how they were related, they probably wouldn't date or get married. (I'd say that's pretty normal, not just an Armenian thing, fyi.) But I wonder if they had done Relative Finder, how distantly related they would have had to be before they shrugged their shoulders and said, "Eh. Doesn't count." (For me it's 3rd cousins, I guess.)
- One funny conversation I got a few times is people who would say that they were closely related to Kevin (he was 5th cousins with like everybody) but not with me, and they were wondering how that worked. I have 15 great-great-great-grandpas besides Henry Moon, so that leaves lots of room for other lines for people to be related. :D
- Most everyone I was related to linked back to the same common ancestors, like a man named Thomas Ford. I was related to more people on my dad's side than on my mom's (probably because his lines are more from England than hers). If I had an ancestor who joined the church in Europe (such as Henry Moon or Traugott Bitter), I was never related to people through that line unless it was directly from that ancestor. Kevin and I talked about it and we think it's because the rest of that family is probably still in Europe.
- If you think about it, if you know you are 14th cousins with someone, a lot of people have done a lot of family history work. That is incredible. I have just gotten to enjoy the fruits of other people's labors. I feel a huge sense of appreciation for people who have done the family history work.
Of course, I had some concerns in creating the group, and some of them were realized. There were people who weren't related to anyone, usually because they or their families hadn't been in the church long so they didn't have enough family history to connect with everyone. Although I felt bad about inadvertently creating a way to make people feel excluded, it was also a good reminder that whether or not we have blood relations, we all have the same spiritual DNA as children of God. And He loves us all.
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