[hennie pennie]

What I have read several places is that if you have one ancestor whom you can trace to before 1680 in America, then you are literally related to many millions of Americans living today -- perhaps Muawiyah or Blam posted about this.

I think it's just astounding, but it's really just a genealogical fact -- the population was small, the available pool for marriages was such that anyone who can trace back to the 1500s or early 1600s America is related.

Astounding, hey? I thought it was a remarkable bit of trivia, how many Americans that Barack Hussein Obama is related to.

[muawiyah]

Obama is, remarkably, related to vast numbers of white Americans and few, if any, black Americans. He's even got the blood of Mohicans and Mohawks in him

~ His African relatives are Luo tribal people. I believe they tend to marry first cousins ~ so he probably has only a couple of dozen relatives there as close as his millions of American relatives.

[SunkenCiv]

It's possible of course, but there's also this bit of math fun:

F

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YOU

This diagram works for most people, but not for folks with Down's Syndrome and a few other conditions. F is for father, M for mother; each of us has up to 64 great-great-great-great-grandcestors; no more than 46 of them has had even one chromosome pair reach you; even with the occasional crossing stream (I don't have even one such pair in my known ancestors, but some of my cousins do) there's no more than 46, and with crossing streams, could be less.