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Archiver > ALT-GENEALOGY > 1999-07 > 0930895098


From: Silver Bullet< >
Subject: Re: How many ancestors are possible?
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 1999 05:58:18 GMT


In the recent past, Steven Mix wrote:

>But I was wrong to concur, because England would have
>only 666,000 descendants, not 3 million. Why? Because
>the intermarriage rate is 5 times greater than in the U.S.
>So the _common_ descendants would occur 5 times
>more often at each generation, resulting in 1/5 the
>number of descendants.

I disagree with you again. I agree there may very well be more cousin
marriages in England, but that has to do with folks "staying in place"
and marrying cousins in future years because the eligible candidates
are cousins and are geographically nearby.

Americans, on the other hand, will have a different experience. Even
the New Englanders before the Revolution moved around a bit,
especially the migration to Connecticut, and after the Revolution
really dispersed, and, after the Irish potato famine of 1840 were
"watered-down" even in their ancestral home of Mass, where the
"stay-at-home" descendants "clustered".

This geograhical dispersion versus clustering issue is the issue that
leads to there being more English cousin marriages and I contend isn't
really measurable, although it's there. But, it certainly would have
nothing to do with relative population size.

If the New Englanders had stayed "clustered" in Massachusetts, the
rate of cousin marriages would be expected to be identical. While the
population of the US as a whole would have still grown at the same
pace.

Norris

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