The anchor and the lifeline

129 years ago, Bertha Viola Scott was born in the little town of Wind Ridge, in Greene County, Pennsylvania.  She was the fourth child of Thomas Iams Scott and Nancy Elizabeth "Lizzie" (Donahoo) Scott; they would go on to have four more.

Her life wasn't easy, pretty much from day one.  Thomas Scott was a ne'er-do-well, with a reputation as a philanderer, and was gone from the home more often than he was there.  Lizzie was a kind person and a good mother, but in 1903 -- when Bertha was ten -- she died in a typhoid epidemic.

Thomas Iams Scott and his mother, Mary (Iams) Scott, ca. 1915

"Lizzie," Nancy Elizabeth (Donahoo) Scott, ca. 1880

The seven Scott children -- one of them, Clarence, had died as an infant -- were farmed out to various uncles and aunts.  Bertha and her two older sisters, Roxzella Vandell Scott ("Zella") and Fannie Elinore Scott ("Fan") decided they had to look after the younger ones to make sure they were being treated fairly, and became the surrogate mothers to their siblings.

Top row, l. to r.: Zella (Scott) Knoderer and her husband Cecil Clair Knoderer

Bottom row, l. to r.: Donald Jacobs (the Scott children's first cousin), Bertha Viola Scott, Albert Romer, and his wife Fan (Scott) Romer (ca. 1912)

In around 1914, when Bertha was 21 years old, she and a younger sister (Florence, then age twelve) upped stakes and moved to southern Louisiana.  I've never known why it was they made the move; to my knowledge, no one else came with them.  They were dirt poor, so it definitely wasn't a pleasure excursion.  It may have had something to do with the beginning of World War I, but if so, I don't know what.  In any case, both of the young ladies met and married someone from Louisiana -- Bertha married a small equipment repairman named Alfred Joseph Bonnet in 1915, and Florence a man from New Orleans named Kirby Lodrigues in 1924 -- and both of them lived in the state for the rest of their lives.

Alfred was a gentle, soft-spoken man, fifteen years Bertha's senior.  They had two children, both sons; Raymond Joseph in 1916, and Gordon Paul -- my father -- in 1919.

My Grandma Bertha and my dad, ca 1927, along with some of their numerous pets

Life didn't get a great deal easier for them.  In 1940, Alfred -- then 61 years old -- died of a sudden and massive heart attack.  My grandmother was widowed at only 47.

My grandfather, Alfred Joseph Bonnet, ca. 1930

My grandmother had no particular training that would have qualified her for a job -- she wasn't well educated, and had gone from the abject poverty of her youth right into a marriage in an unfamiliar place -- so she took on a position as housekeeper for a Catholic priest, an eccentric, cigar-smoking Dutch expat named Father John Kemps.  She finally became not only Father Kemps's housekeeper but his general manager, and he needed one.  He was a bookish, multilingual polymath who couldn't be counted upon to remember where he'd put his shoes, and my grandma took over the oversight of the household, the parish affairs, and Father Kemps's personal life, eventually pretty much running the place singlehandedly.

Bertha and Father Kemps, on a trip to visit Father Kemps's family in the Netherlands (ca. 1960) -- he convinced her to don some traditional clothing and pose like they were in a portrait by one of the Old Dutch Masters

My father joined the Marine Corps at the beginning of World War II, and spent the next 25 years bouncing from military base to military base, never staying in one post for more than three or four years.  He married my mom, a full-blooded Cajun from Raceland, Louisiana, in 1943, and two years later my sister and only sibling, Mary Margaret, was born.  Mary was born with Rh-incompatibility syndrome, and only lived three days.

It wasn't until fifteen years later that I came along -- a surprise, apparently, sometimes referred to as an out-and-out mistake.  In an eerie repeat of his own grandfather, my father was gone through a good bit of my early childhood, but in this case not by choice.  He was stationed in Reykjavik, Iceland when I was a year and a half old, and back then families rarely accompanied service members on overseas assignments.  My mom and I moved back home and lived with her father and stepmother.

This set up a fractious relationship, and honestly, it never improved much.  My parents were kind of an odd couple in a lot of ways -- my dad reserved, quiet, with a quirky and offbeat sense of humor; my mother artistic, emotional, and volatile.  Having an unplanned child suddenly show up when my dad was 41 and my mom 40 didn't improve matters any.  When I was eight, my dad retired from the military and came back home to Louisiana -- and my parents sent me to live with my grandma for a year and a half.  The reason they gave was that they were working on building a house and didn't want a little kid getting in the way, but I think it was probably just as much that they didn't quite know what to do with me.

However, it did forge a strong relationship between me and my grandma.  She became my anchor.  She was a tough, no-nonsense type, but loved dogs and cats, music, and talking about family history, all of which I shared.  My passion for genealogy started when I was about twelve, and she told me about her childhood and her own parents and grandparents, and I decided to write it all down.

My grandma, Bertha (Scott) Bonnet, as I remember her (ca. 1975)

In a lot of ways, that relationship with my grandma kept me going during my turbulent and difficult teenage years, and I remained close to her up through college.  I moved out of state in 1982, and kept in touch with regular letters -- my grandma loved receiving letters -- and when she died four years later, at the age of 93, it felt like a lifeline had been cut.

Now, 36 years later, I still cherish my memories of her, and the anniversary of her birth (March 4) always makes me think about her.  Her story is an inspiration -- that despite the cards stacked against you, you can still stay strong and survive.  My grandma started from deprivation and poverty, and beginning with the pact she made with her sisters to protect their younger siblings after their mother died, she lived life fiercely protective of the people she loved and uncompromising in her own ideals.  

I can only hope that I have lived my own life with the courage, devotion, and determination she showed in the face of adversity, and that she'd be proud of who I've become.  I still miss you, Grandma.  Happy birthday.

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All in the family

Coming from the Wishful Thinking department, today we have a woman in Murrysville, Pennsylvania who claims she is the Virgin Mary's first cousin, 65 times removed.

I was sent the link to this story by a friend who knows my fascination with genealogy and my interest in goofy claims, and this certainly hits both pretty well.  In it, we read about Mary Beth Webb, who began her inquiry into her genealogy in 1999 shortly after her brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Like most of us who have done genealogical research, Webb started with census and other vital records, and used online resources like Ancestry.com and Rootsweb.  But this evidently proved inadequate -- she began to run into dead ends, which genealogists call "brick walls."  I have several of these frustrating people in my own family tree, the most annoying of which is the direct paternal ancestor of my grandmother.  His name is recorded as John Scott in all of the records -- but a recent Y-DNA study of one of his patrilineal descendants proved beyond question that he was actually a Hamilton, allied to the Scottish Clan Hamilton of Raploch.  And interestingly... one of his grandsons was named Hamilton Scott, and a great-grandson was Hamilton Grim.

But we have been unable to find anything more about his origins, despite extensive research.

Perhaps, though, we should take a page from Webb's book.  Because when she became stymied by various long-dead ancestors, she adopted a novel method for researching her roots.  She simply asked her parents.

The "novel" part comes in because her parents were both dead at the time.

Fortunately for her, her cousin is a medium, and was happy to contact her parents for her, and (after his death) her brother.  And all three of the dear departed told her all sorts of details about her ancestors, because (after all) the whole lot of them were up in heaven with them.

I don't know if that'd work so well in my family.  I've got some seriously sketchy ancestry, including a guy who spent years in prison in New Jersey for "riot, poaching, and mischief," a Scottish dude who lost his soul to the devil in a game of cards, and a French military officer who almost got hanged for killing a guy he found in flagrante delicto with his wife.  So I might have better success if the medium tried contacting people down below, if you get my drift.

"Yes... great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre says to tell you hi, and to let you know you're a direct descendant of Attila the Hun.  Also, please send down an air conditioner and a six-pack of cold beer, because it's a bit toasty down here.  Thanks bunches."

But of course, Webb's relatives all were either nicer or luckier or both, so she got scads of heaven-sent information about her genealogy.  And after a bit of this kind of "research," she found out that she was a direct descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, who was allegedly the Virgin Mary's uncle.  According to Webb's calculations, this makes her Mary's first cousin 65 times removed.

The problem is, the whole thing about Descent From Antiquity (as genealogists refer to any claims of pre-medieval proven ancestry) is that the best historians don't consider much of it to be true, especially the European bit.  (There are, however, apparently people in China who can with a fair degree of certainty trace their ancestry back to Confucius, who was born over 2,500 years ago.  So that's kind of impressive.)

People of European and Middle Eastern descent, however, don't have it so lucky.  The time between the Fall of Rome and the beginning of the Medieval Age is seriously lacking in reliable documentation, and what we have in the way of such records stands a good chance of being (1) a forgery, or (2) a lie.  Or (3), both.  By the time the Medieval Age was in full swing, the Romans were looked upon as being a Golden Age, despite the fact that a good fraction of the nobility in ancient Rome seemed to have some major screws loose.  So there were lots of people claiming descent from the Emperors and Empresses to boost their own stature, with several proposed routes going the proconsul Flavius Afranius Syagrius, and thence to the Egyptian pharaohs and whatnot.

But some people one-up even Webb's claims, and trace their lineages all the way back to Adam and Eve.  I kid you not.  If you go into Rootsweb, you can do a search for people descended from Adam and Eve, and find thousands.

Now that's what I call descent from antiquity.

Sadly, even the descent from the Romans relies on poor historical research and lots of wishful thinking, as does Webb's claim to have proven descent from Joseph of Arimathea.  About as far back as anyone with European ancestry can reliably get is Charlemagne, which sounds cool but isn't because damn near everyone with European ancestry descends from him, because he was proficient at one other thing besides ruling most of Western Europe, which was shagging any women who were willing.

But honestly, that's really not that surprising.  Given the small size of the population back then, if you go back far enough (some geneticists say 1200 C.E. is sufficient), then you descend from everyone in your ancestral homeland who left descendants.  Put another way: prior to 1200 C. E., you can divide all of humanity into two groups; those who were the ancestors of most everyone of that particular ethnicity alive on the Earth today, and those who were the ancestors of no one.  So we're all cousins, really.  And if Joseph of Arimathea left progeny -- which no one knows for sure -- then chances are, Mary Beth Webb is his descendant.

But chances are so am I, and (if you have European or Middle Eastern ancestry), so are you.

But I don't know that because my dead relatives told me so, I just know it because of genetic studies and logic.  Which may be less cool, but is a damn sight more reliable than trying to get a direct line to great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre down in hell.

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These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Family matters

New from the "You're Kidding, Right?" department, we find out that it's significant that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are distant cousins.

Genealogists have apparently figured out that Trump and Clinton both descend from English King Edward III, making them 19th cousins, give or take a once-removed.  Trump traces his descent through his mother's family (the MacLeods), and Clinton through her father's (the Rodhams).

Author A. J. Jacobs, who worked with genealogical research website Geni.com to figure all this out, waxed rhapsodic about what it all meant.

"Their 18th great grandfather is King Edward III, so there is precedent for ruling a country," Jacobs said.  "It’s in their genes."

Turns out, according to the article, that not only do Clinton and Trump have British royal blood -- so does every one of the United States presidents except for Martin van Buren (mostly because van Buren was of Dutch ancestry).  All of the others, apparently, descend from King John of England, not that that's any great claim to fame, as John was so notorious for losing territory through military ineptitude that he was nicknamed John "Lackland," and has been described by historians as "petty, spiteful, and cruel."

Be that as it may, there are a couple of problems with this whole contention.

The first one is the idea that being 19th cousins would confer upon a pair of people any related traits at all.  Let's suppose that such characteristics as "fitness to rule a country" are actually inheritable -- a supposition, by the way, which is almost certainly wrong, but which for the sake of argument we'll bear with for the time being.  How many of Edward III's kingliness genes would Clinton and Trump share?

Assuming that Clinton and Trump have no other common ancestry -- another lousy assumption, as you'll see in a moment -- to figure out the proportion of their shared heritage, you'd use something like the following calculation.  Siblings have the same parents; first cousins share one set of grandparents, and therefore half of their lineage; second cousins, one set of great-grandparents, and thus a fourth of their lineage, and so on.  So the shared heritage of a set of nth-degree cousins is 1 over 2 to the nth power.  Which in the case of 19th cousins, means that...

One-524,288th of their ancestry is the same.  In other words: not much.

But what about that assumption of no other shared ancestry?  The number of ancestors in your family tree doubles every generation; so it's the inverse of the previous calculation.  If there have been 19 generations between Edward III's time and now, then Trump and Clinton would each have something over five hundred thousand ancestors.  Each.

Given that current estimates of England's population in the mid-14th century average at around four million individuals, what's the likelihood that they don't descend from damn near every medieval British person who left descendants -- kings, commoners, peasants, all of them?  Everyone with English ancestry is related, and the chances are good that they all descend from royalty.

Oh, and while we're on the subject: my wife also descends from King Edward III.  I don't seem to, although on the Scottish side of my family I descend from King Duncan (of Macbeth fame) through my ancestor Alexander Lindsay, the evil "Red Earl" who lost his soul to the devil in a dice game and now haunts Glamis Castle, swearing loudly and scaring small children.

So maybe there's something to this genetic predisposition thing, after all.

It's kind of funny that this sort of claim gets circulated at all, given the fact that with a little bit of logic and a few simple calculations, you can easily see how ridiculous it is.  Maybe it's because the whole concept of royal blood and nobility has been so drilled into our cultural consciousness by fairy tales that we think it must mean something if you can trace your ancestry back to King Angus the Demented.  Or maybe it's because a lot of people can't be bothered to question what they read.

Myself, I'm just as happy that the majority of my heritage (with the exception of the aforementioned evil Earl) is solid peasant stock.  Some of those kings and queens were loons.

All in the family

In the latest from the Wishful Thinking department, we have a woman in Murrysville, Pennsylvania who claims she is the Virgin Mary's first cousin, 65 times removed.

Mary Beth Webb began her inquiry into her genealogy in 1999, shortly after her brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Like most of us who have done genealogical research, Webb started with census and other vital records, and used online resources like Ancestry.com and Rootsweb.  But this evidently proved inadequate -- she began to run into dead ends, which genealogists call "brick walls."  I have several of these frustrating people in my own family tree, the most annoying of which is the direct paternal ancestor of my grandmother.  His name is recorded as John Scott in all of the records -- but a recent Y-DNA study of one of his patrilineal descendants proved beyond question that he was actually a Hamilton, allied to the Scottish Clan Hamilton of Raploch.  And interestingly... two of his grandsons were named Hamilton Scott.

But we have been unable to find anything more about his origins, despite extensive research.

Perhaps, though, we should take a page from Webb's book.  Because when she became stymied by various long-dead ancestors, she adopted a novel method for researching her roots.  She simply asked her parents.

The "novel" part comes in because her parents were both dead at the time.

But fortunately for her, her cousin is a medium, and was happy to contact her parents for her, and (after his death) her brother.  And all three of the dear departed told her all sorts of details about her ancestors, because (after all) the whole lot of them were up in heaven with them.

I don't know if that'd work so well in my family.  I've got some seriously sketchy ancestry, including a guy who spent years in prison in New Jersey for "riot, poaching, and mischief," a Scottish dude who lost his soul to the devil in a game of cards, and a French military officer who almost got hanged for killing a guy he found in flagrante delicto with his wife.  So I might have better success if the medium tried contacting people down below, if you get my drift.

"Yes... great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre says to tell you hi, and to also to let you know you're a direct descendant of Attila the Hun.  Also, please send down an air conditioner, because it's a bit toasty down here.  Thanks bunches."

But of course, Webb's relatives all were either nicer or luckier or both, so she got scads of heaven-sent information about her genealogy.  And after a bit of this kind of "research," she found out that she was a direct descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, who was allegedly the Virgin Mary's uncle.  According to Webb's calculations, this makes her Mary's first cousin 65 times removed.

The problem is, the whole thing about Descent From Antiquity (as genealogists refer to any claims of pre-medieval proven ancestry) is that the best historians don't consider any of it to be true.  The time between the Fall of Rome and the beginning of the Medieval Age was seriously lacking in reliable documentation, and what we have in the way of such records stands a good chance of being (1) a forgery, or (2) a lie.  Or (3), both.  By the time the Medieval Age was in full swing, the Romans were looked upon as being a Golden Age, despite the fact that a good fraction of the nobility in ancient Rome seemed to have some major screws loose.  So there were lots of people claiming descent from the Emperors and Empresses to boost their own stature, with several proposed routes going the proconsul Flavius Afranius Syagrius, and thence to the Egyptian pharaohs and whatnot.

But some people one-up even Webb's claims, and trace their lineages all the way back to Adam and Eve.  I kid you not.  If you go into Rootsweb, you can do a search for people descended from Adam and Eve, and find thousands.

Now that's what I call descent from antiquity.

But, sadly, even the descent from the Romans relies on poor historical research and lots of wishful thinking, as does Webb's claim to have proven descent from Joseph of Arimathea.  About as far back as anyone with European ancestry can reliably get is Charlemagne, which sounds cool but isn't because damn near everyone with European ancestry descends from him, because he was proficient at one other thing besides ruling most of Western Europe, if you catch my meaning.

But honestly, that's really not that surprising.  Given the small size of the population back then, if you go back far enough (some geneticists say 1200 C.E. is sufficient), then you descend from everyone in your ancestral homeland who left descendants.  Put another way: prior to 1200 C. E., you can divide all of humanity into two groups; those who were the ancestors of most everyone alive on the Earth today, and those who were the ancestors of no one.  So we're all cousins, really.  And if Joseph of Arimathea left progeny -- which no one knows for sure -- then chances are, Mary Beth Webb is his descendant.

But chances are so am I, and (if you have European or Middle Eastern ancestry), so are you.

But I don't know that because my dead relatives told me so, I just know it because of genetic studies and logic.  Which may be less cool, but is a damn sight more reliable than trying to get a direct line to great-great-great grandpa Jean-Pierre down in hell.