Obama and Washington are "Polish-Americans"

[Tomenable]

Barack Obama is descended from Mieszko I, first historical ruler of Poland:

http://x0.wykop.pl/cdn/c0834752/11uj...ef1d45522f272a



George Washington (Jerzy Waszyngton) is also descended from Mieszko I:

http://x0.wykop.pl/cdn/c0834752/01uj...ef1d45522f272a



I wonder if Donald Trump is also descended from Mieszko I ???

Queen Elisabeth II is descended from him in at least 2 lines of descent:

http://s9.postimg.org/aips2cghr/Mies..._Elisabeth.png

[Maciamo]

If you go back to the Middle Ages, Obama has ancestors in most of Catholic (and Protestant as they were Catholic in the Middle Ages) Europe. Once you find one ancestor in the nobility, the tree quickly become international.

Apparently some genealogists calculated that a third of all Americans may be descended from King John (of Robin Hood fame), and through him a big chunk of the English, Scottish, French, Norman/Viking, Belgian (e.g. Flanders, Brabant, Hainaut) and German nobility of earlier centuries. Virtually all British people have royal ancestors and therefore traceable ancestors in historical times many European countries, including Poland. There is nothing special about this.

Anyway, so many generations elapsed that, even if the paper trail is correct, there may be no inherited DNA due to recombinaisons at each generations cutting out part of the ancestry in favour of others. As you know it is wrong to say that we inherited 12.5% of our DNA from each great-grand parent. It might be 9% or 15%. It's sad that they still teach that in most universities though (even at MIT from what I saw on their online courses). It's simpler to teach it this way, by simplicity is not a virtue when it's wrong. If only people learned that after 7 generations, you do not inevitably inherited a mathematical 0.78125% of each ancestor's genome but that some ancestors contribute to more than 1% and others to 0%. And that's barely after 7 generations. There are 38 generations separating Obama from Mieszko I. In other words, even if his genetic contribution was not eliminated by recombinaisons somewhere along those 38 generations, the amount contributed would be less than 0.0000000001% of the genome. Any European would almost certainly share an incredibly greater amount of DNA (many tens of thousands times greater) with a random Chinese, Indian or Ethiopian than that figure.

All this to say that single ancestors on a family tree do not contribute anything meaningful to one's genome after a few generations. The only ancestor that keeps contributing the same 1% of DNA generation after generation, even after 1000 or 2000 years if the one on the patrilineal line for men. I wonder why people still care about genealogy. It's almost as meaningless as astrology.

Genetic inheritance is much more complex than most people realise. Back in 2009 I posted an article explaining, among others, how men (but not women) inherit from DNA from their mothers, and why some children were closer to one parent genetically (and also in terms of looks, character, tastes, etc.). It's not something that people understand instinctively, and indeed I have met a lot of people who have been to Med school or studied biology and had never thought about it.

[LeBrok]

With this long temporal distance we all Europeans and their descendants are connected to historical figures. I'm sure Cesar and Aristotle were some of my million ancestors.

[bicicleur]

it is quite simple, population increases exponential as time progresses



the number of your ancestors also grows exponentialy as you go further back in time

and 500 years ago, the nobility was far more likely to have ofspring that prospered and survived than simple peasants

[Yetos]

Anyway,

I do not know my family tree from 960

I know it from 1850, and read some marriages and baptise (name giving) ceremonies, that are written in church lists, so I can run till 1780 about, and offcourse uncertain.

the effort to go so back almost 1 millenium is something, don't you think?


yet if you think much more, to add some conspiracy colour
the same families that ruled Europe at medieval,
the same are rulling USA today,
so you need 'blue royal blood' to become a president?????
ha?


PS
Tomenable, can we find the origin of Mieszko I,
I wonder from who are his origins,

[LABERIA]

With this long temporal distance we all Europeans and their descendants are connected to historical figures. I'm sure Cesar and Aristotle were some of my million ancestors.

THE LOOM
Charlemagne’s DNA and Our Universal Royalty
POSTED TUE, 05/7/2013
Nobody in my past was hugely famous, at least that I know of. I vaguely recall that an ancestor of mine who shipped over on the Mayflower distinguished himself by falling out of the ship and having to get fished out of the water. He might be notable, I guess, but hardly famous. It is much more fun to think that I am a bloodline descendant of Charlemagne. And in 1999, Joseph Chang gave me permission to think that way.

Chang was not a genealogist who had decided to make me his personal project. Instead, he is a statistician at Yale who likes to think of genealogy as a mathematical problem. When you draw your genealogy, you make two lines from yourself back to each of your parents. Then you have to draw two lines for each of them, back to your four grandparents. And then eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on. But not so on for very long. If you go back to the time of Charlemagne, forty generations or so, you should get to a generation of a trillion ancestors. That’s about two thousand times more people than existed on Earth when Charlemagne was alive.

The only way out of this paradox is to assume that our ancestors are not independent of one another. That is, if you trace their ancestry back, you loop back to a common ancestor. We’re not talking about first-cousin stuff here–more like twentieth-cousin. This means that instead of drawing a tree that fans out exponentially, we need to draw a web-like tapestry.

In a paper he published in 1999 [pdf], Chang analyzed this tapestry mathematically. If you look at the ancestry of a living population of people, he concluded, you’ll eventually find a common ancestor of all of them. That’s not to say that a single mythical woman somehow produced every European by magically laying a clutch of eggs. All this means is that as you move back through time, sooner or later some of the lines in the genealogy will cross, meeting at a single person.

As you go back further in time, more of those lines cross as you encounter more common ancestors of the living population. And then something really interesting happens. There comes a point at which, Chang wrote, “all individuals who have any descendants among the present-day individuals are actually ancestors of all present-day individuals.”

In 2002, the journalist Steven Olson wrote an article in the Atlantic about Chang’s work. To put some empirical meat on the abstract bones of Chang’s research, Olson considered a group of real people–living Europeans.
The most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past—only about 600 years ago. In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400. Before that date, according to Chang’s model, the number of ancestors common to all Europeans today increased, until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation prevailed: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living today.

Suddenly, my pedigree looked classier: I am a descendant of Charlemagne. Of course, so is every other European. By the way, I’m also a descendant of Nefertiti. And so are you, and everyone else on Earth today. Chang figured that out by expanding his model from living Europeans to living humans, and getting an estimate of 3400 years instead of a thousand for the all-ancestor generation.

Things have changed a lot in the fourteen years since Chang published his first paper on ancestry. Scientists have amassed huge databases of genetic information about people all over the world. These may not be the same thing as a complete genealogy of the human race, but geneticists can still use them to tackle some of the same questions that intrigued Chang.

Recently, two geneticists, Peter Ralph of the University of Southern California and Graham Coop of the University of California at Davis, decided to look at the ancestry of Europe. They took advantage of a compilation of information about 2257 people from across the continent. Scientists had examined half a million sites in each person’s DNA, creating a distinctive list of genetic markers for each of them.

You can use this kind of genetic information to make some genealogical inferences, but you have to know what you’re dealing with. Your DNA is not a carbon copy of your parents’. Each time they made eggs or sperm, they shuffled the two copies of each of their chromosomes and put one in the cell. Just as a new deck gets more scrambled the more times you shuffle it, chromosomes get more shuffled from one generation to the next.

This means that if you compare two people’s DNA, you will find some chunks that are identical in sequence. The more closely related people are, the bigger the chunks you’ll find. This diagram shows how two first cousins share a piece of DNA that’s identical by descent (IBD for short).
Ralph and Coop identified 1.9 million of these long shared segments of DNA shared by at least two people in their study. They then used the length of each segment to estimate how long ago it arose from a common ancestor of the living Europeans.

Their results, published today in PLOS Biology, both confirm Chang’s mathematical approach and enrich it. Even within the past thousand years, Ralph and Coop found, people on opposite sides of the continent share a lot of segments in common–so many, in fact, that it’s statistically impossible for them to have gotten them all from a single ancestor. Instead, someone in Turkey and someone in England have to share a lot of ancestors. In fact, as Chang suspected, the only way to explain the DNA is to conclude that everyone who lived a thousand years ago who has any descendants today is an ancestor of every European. Charlemagne for everyone!

If you compare two people in Turkey, you’ll find bigger shared segments of DNA, which isn’t surprising. Since they live in the same country, chances are they have more recent ancestors, and more of them. But there is a rich, intriguing pattern to the number of shared segments among Europeans. People across Eastern Europe, for example, have a larger set of shared segments than people from within single countries in Western Europe. That difference may be the signature of a big expansion of the Slavs.

Ralph and Coop’s study may provide a new tool for reconstructing the history of humans on every continent, not just Europe. It will also probably keep people puzzling over the complexities of genealogy. If Europeans today share the same ancestors a thousand years ago, for example, why don’t they all look the same?

Fortunately, Ralph and Coop have written up a helpful FAQ for their paper, which you can find here.

[Update: Adjusted the estimated generations since Charlemagne to thirty. Corrected Ralph’s affiliation.]

Source:
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic....ersal-royalty/

[Rethel]

..................................................

[HGMIVL]

"All this to say that single ancestors on a family tree do not contribute anything meaningful to one's genome after a few generations. The only ancestor that keeps contributing the same 1% of DNA generation after generation, even after 1000 or 2000 years if the one on the patrilineal line for men. I wonder why people still care about genealogy. It's almost as meaningless as astrology."

Maciamo, those last two sentences are kind of world-changing for a genealogist, but you're absolutely right.

[castelleone]

... Anyway, so many generations elapsed that, even if the paper trail is correct, there may be no inherited DNA due to recombinaisons at each generations cutting out part of the ancestry in favour of others. As you know it is wrong to say that we inherited 12.5% of our DNA from each great-grand parent. It might be 9% or 15%. ... In other words, even if his genetic contribution was not eliminated by recombinaisons somewhere along those 38 generations, the amount contributed would be less than 0.0000000001% of the genome. Any European would almost certainly share an incredibly greater amount of DNA (many tens of thousands times greater) with a random Chinese, Indian or Ethiopian than that figure.

That is certainly counter-intuitive.
How were these limits (i.e. 9% - 15%) stablished?
Would if FTDNA (for example) be able to find a match to such ancient ancestor...? I doubt.

... All this to say that single ancestors on a family tree do not contribute anything meaningful to one's genome after a few generations. The only ancestor that keeps contributing the same 1% of DNA generation after generation, even after 1000 or 2000 years if the one on the patrilineal line for men. I wonder why people still care about genealogy. It's almost as meaningless as astrology.

Excuse my curiosity, how was this amount (i.e. 1%) stablished?
If the point of creating our own family tree is solely to claim ancestry from ancient times, then it is quite silly indeed. But I guess that some people care about genealogy for cultural and historical purposes.

[castelleone]

it is quite simple, population increases exponential as time progresses

the number of your ancestors also grows exponentialy as you go further back in time

and 500 years ago, the nobility was far more likely to have ofspring that prospered and survived than simple peasants

In fact, the number of our ancestors does not grow exponentially as you go further back in time if you consider the effects of endogamy, specially in royal bloodlines.

[gyms]

Ancestry of Elizabeth II

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestry_of_Elizabeth_II
Generation 5 (2nd great-grandparents)
21. Countess Claudine Rhédey von Kis-Rhéde (mother of 10)

The Rhédey Castle was built in 1759 on the site of a former 16th-century castle. The castle was rebuilt in 1808. This is where Claudia Rhédey, grandmother of Queen Mary, great-great-grandmother of Elizabeth II grew up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A...de_P%C4%83dure

At the Prince of Wales' property in Transylvania:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02ypy18/p02yvyt5

[castelleone]

Ancestry of Elizabeth II

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestry_of_Elizabeth_II
Generation 5 (2nd great-grandparents)
21. Countess Claudine Rhédey von Kis-Rhéde (mother of 10)

The Rhédey Castle was built in 1759 on the site of a former 16th-century castle. The castle was rebuilt in 1808. This is where Claudia Rhédey, grandmother of Queen Mary, great-great-grandmother of Elizabeth II grew up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A...de_P%C4%83dure

At the Prince of Wales' property in Transylvania:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02ypy18/p02yvyt5

Thank you.
But how does that link to Obama and Washington being "Polish-Americans"?

[gyms]

[QUOTE=castelleone;507164]Thank you.
But how does that link to Obama and Washington being "Polish

Polak, Węgier, dwa bratanki, i do szabli, i do szklanki

[Sennevini]

Everyone has loads of endogamy, and not only the royals. Endogamy is an important factor in creating a distinct population.
If I go back 12 generations, I arrive at a generation, in which there are 2048 "ancestor slots". I know one third of my ancestors in that generation, say born around 1650. The endogamy within that one third is so, that I have a maximum of 1998 ancestors occupying those 2048 slots. That's 2,5% inbreeding. This must increase more the further one goes back.
Another example is one ancestor, who I see around 12 times, 18 generations back. He was one of the first inhabitants of a new Dutch polder area, so new families pouring in, often married his descendents. Now, 18 generations back, I know less than 1% of my ancestry. And this one guy appears twelve times within that 1%. Now, I am certainly not 100% descended from the same area, but I expect this guy to turn up at least 50 times more within the other 99% of yet unknown ancestry. If more people also follow this same route, then, I don't expect to have 1mln different ancestors 20 generations back, but only 100k at most (this would differ per population).

And this is what makes populations distinct. Around the year 1000, Europeans generally share the same ancestors, but a Dutchman can descend 100 times from a Frankish man, while a Greek only descends 1 time from that man, and the Greek does descend 1000 times from a Byzantine person, but the Dutchman 1 time.

[LeBrok]

Everyone has loads of endogamy, and not only the royals. Endogamy is an important factor in creating a distinct population.
If I go back 12 generations, I arrive at a generation, in which there are 2048 "ancestor slots". I know one third of my ancestors in that generation, say born around 1650. The endogamy within that one third is so, that I have a maximum of 1998 ancestors occupying those 2048 slots. That's 2,5% inbreeding. This must increase more the further one goes back.
Another example is one ancestor, who I see around 12 times, 18 generations back. He was one of the first inhabitants of a new Dutch polder area, so new families pouring in, often married his descendents. Now, 18 generations back, I know less than 1% of my ancestry. And this one guy appears twelve times within that 1%. Now, I am certainly not 100% descended from the same area, but I expect this guy to turn up at least 50 times more within the other 99% of yet unknown ancestry. If more people also follow this same route, then, I don't expect to have 1mln different ancestors 20 generations back, but only 100k at most (this would differ per population).

And this is what makes populations distinct. Around the year 1000, Europeans generally share the same ancestors, but a Dutchman can descend 100 times from a Frankish man, while a Greek only descends 1 time from that man, and the Greek does descend 1000 times from a Byzantine person, but the Dutchman 1 time.

I like you explanation.