Races are Open

So, who are you related to anyway?  Who do you have most in common with anyway?

If it takes about 45 years to produce a college student your parents were born in about 1966.  They were probably born when their parents were about 23 or 24, so your grandparents were probably born about 1943.  If we take 23 as the generational number then your great grandparents were born in 1920, great-great in 1897, great 3 in 1874, great 4 in 1851, great 5 in 1828, great 6 1805, and great 7 in 1782 and 8 great in 1757.  This means that, you had about 256 ancestors, all equally related to you, who were about 19 years old at the time of the American Revolution. Do you have any idea who they were. Go back further and the numbers get really really big:

1734: 512
1711: 1024
1688: 2048
1665: 4096
1642: 8192
1619: 16,384
1596: 32,768
1573: 65,536: So, at the time of the Spanish Armada (1588), you had up to 65,536 direct ancestors who were about 15 years old (and we're only talking about directs here...no cousins aunts and uncles). If we allow another hundred years to pass...back to 1460 (the time of Richard III), the numbers would rise to about 4.2 million. The estimated population of England at that time was about 3 million. If we drop back to 1000 AD, the numbers would be 8,820,000,000,000, almost 9 trillion. However the total world population in AD 1000 is believed to have been between 200 and 500 million.

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