Seeking our roots

Since childhood I have wanted to know who my ancestors were and where I came from. This flowed out of a general interest in history. I knew the major milestones such as the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages and the exploration and settlement of the Americas. But where did my own family enter the picture?

Fortunately, my maternal great-grandmother, Lucy Jane Bentley Hyder (1875-1948), had the foresight to record two reminiscences of her own forebears extending back to the late 18th century. These included her grandfather David Wells (born c 1815), of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, who, on the day the American Civil War ended, was murdered by “the Raiders or Ku Klux Klan as they were sometimes called.”

Connected to kings

With the dawn of online genealogical sites, I was able to verify virtually all of the information Lucy Jane had committed to paper in the 1940s, along with much more. David Wells was descended from one Captain Cornelius Howard, Sr. (1637-1680), a member of the Maryland colonial assembly during the time that my wife’s Calvert ancestors, the Lords Baltimore, were running the colony.

The goal of most genealogy fans is to find a connection with the so-called world family tree, consisting of the various interconnected royal and noble families of Europe. I was easily able to find multiple connections through both David Wells and his wife Nancy’s ancestors, making our family plausible descendants of the Plantagenet monarchs of England and the Capetian kings of France.

Common forebears

But, as it turns out, such a connection is not statistically significant. If we multiply each successive generation backwards by two, we will discover that the numbers of our ancestors quickly grow to an unimaginable size. If we go back thirty generations, we each have over a billion forebears. But given the small numbers of people on earth at the time, we are almost certainly descended from many of the same people in multiple ways. If we have European forebears, we are distantly related to millions of people, including strangers we might pass on the street.

It is sobering to think that, if any one of my forebears hadn’t been born, I would not be here today. If only one link in the chain had been broken, this column would not have been written, and you would not be reading these words. Obviously, I thank God that the chain remained intact.

The Bible is filled with genealogies, the most important of which are found in Matthew and Luke, culminating in the birth of Jesus, tracing his descent from David, Israel’s exemplary ruler. Even if we can’t find our own connection to the world family tree, we can find our own place in history in that we are heirs of God’s kingdom through the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus, “great David’s greater Son.”