Growing up, I heard the same anecdote 10+ from all sorts of people:
"I'm descended from the guy who fell overboard on the Mayflower!"
I concluded pretty early on that the claim must be either dubious, or that any claims of ancestry become uninteresting past your grandfather.
Heck, if we are going back to pre-Colonial ages, the pool of people I am related to is likely in the millions. For a world that was much, much smaller than it is today. It seems so weird to me that people want to just follow occasional threads and tell you how special they are.
In the article, if you go back to 1000AD, you're descended from literally every European alive who has any descendants at all. I think that's a much more interesting claim than the headline.
Grandfather seems to be cutting it off a bit early. Even 10 generations ago you have a maximum of 1024 ancestors. Assuming 30 years per generation and that all of your ancestors were already in the US, you would be descended from at most about one out of every 400 people in the US at that point. In reality it's probably an even lower portion because there are probably people who show up multiple places in your family tree and the bulk of the US's immigration happened after that.
"I'm descended from the guy who fell overboard on the Mayflower!"
I concluded pretty early on that the claim must be either dubious, or that any claims of ancestry become uninteresting past your grandfather.
Heck, if we are going back to pre-Colonial ages, the pool of people I am related to is likely in the millions. For a world that was much, much smaller than it is today. It seems so weird to me that people want to just follow occasional threads and tell you how special they are.