How Many GGG Grandparents?
Replies: 5
Re: How Many GGG Grandparents?
| Jessica Chisholm (View posts) | Posted: 7 Mar 2006 5:28AM GMT |
Classification: Query
Matter of simple mathematics. Your ancestors double every generation, so you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 g-grandparents, 16 gg-grandparents, 32 ggg-grandparents, 64 gggg-grandparents, 128 ggggg-grandparents, and so forth and so on. Pretty soon you get into the thousands and millions of ancestors! But then something happens called "pedigree collapse", when cousins marry one another and hav children. The same couples will appear multiple times on your family tree. This is why the number of real ancestors is always lower than the number of theoretical ancestors.