A Long and Logarithmetric Look at My Ancestors

I have been looking into my genealogy recently. I thought I would combine some vignettes about some of my ancestors with some evolutionary science and combine it into a rather loosely related blog.

Presently, I have no living ancestors. I am orphaned at the tender young age of 56. But one year ago I did have a living ancestor.

1 year ago:
My mother was alive. Or at least alive in body. Her mind had checked out six months to a year earlier. She was barely conscious and in bed at a nursing home and was about a month away from her death. I live a thousand miles away from her. I had gone to visit her for the last time a month or so earlier. She was more agitated then. In fact, she was a pest.

She knew something was wrong with her but her brain did not allow her to figure it out. In an effort to try and make things normal she tried to set herself up on a strict schedule. She had a calender beside her bed. That was one the most important things in her room. Whenever she would wake up in the morning she would mark an "X" on the day. Her idea was that it would let her know which day it was. It didn't work all that well. She would forget whether or not she had made the "X" on the calender or not. Some days she wouldn't mark it; some days she would mark multiple days.

She ended up asking everyone who passed her room if she had marked the correct day or not. And by "everybody" I mean everybody. It didn't matter if she had asked a person just a minute before, if someone passed by she would ask again ... even if it was the same person who passed by only a minute earlier.

Then she worried about lunch time. She constantly how long it would be until lunch. Lunch was always served at 12:00 noon. She had a clock and she could tell time, but it was beyond her to figure out that if the clock said it was 11:15 that lunch would be in 45 minutes. She would ask how much longer until lunch, ... and she would ask it over and over again. As much as 30 times in that 45 minute period.

She would drive people crazy with constant pestering. She drove off two of her roommates. They each asked to be moved out of her room. It hurt me to see her like that. She was in the process of dying ugly. She was not the woman that I had known as a child, teenager, and adult. When she finally died in September, there was pain and sadness .... but there was also relief.

10 years ago:
Mom was still my only living ancestor. Dad had died about 8 years previously. Mom was getting old. She had a leg injury that made walking very difficult. She would soon be confined to a wheelchair. But she was the same caring person who had been a nurse in World War II, a wife of an enlisted Airman for 40 years, raised two children, and started the first home-health agency in our home county.

Dad had died unexpectedly of a heart attack. We were worried about how well she would adjust to his death. She did great. She quit smoking (a 50 year habit that she had been unsuccessful at quitiing several times before). She made friends and would take day-trips with them to places around our little rural town. She kept up with her family. Her two sons and four grandchildren. She was a thoroughly pleasant person to be around.

She did have spells of forgetfulness that were probably early signs of Alzheimer's but at the time we thought nothing of them.

100 years ago.
I had several living ancestors then. All my grandparents were alive and in the prime of their lives. So were my greatgrandparents and many of my great-greatgrandparents. Most of them lived near my ancestral home in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina.

None owned a car. The main means of transportation was a horse. For the most part there was no electricity in their houses. There were no indoor toilets either. They would poop in an outhouse. One grandparent had dammed a small spring that came out of the mountain and run a pipe down into his kitchen. The water ran continuously. Besides the sink he kept a pan that he would use to get drinking water from the faucet. Water for bathing was heated on a wood-burning pot-bellied stove. From there it was poured into a large galvanized steel container and the person bathed in it. Baths were time consuming and the family was large (parents and 6 kids). Baths were generally taken every other to every third day.

Interestingly some of these people would live long enough to see men travel to the moon ... and that is something I think most people likely to read this blog have never seen.

One of my ancestors living a hundred years ago was Sarah Enloe. She was my father's grandmother. Her grandfather was a man named Abraham Enloe. She passed along to the family a story that is well represented on the internet today. According to that story, Abraham Enloe had an indentured servant working in his house named Nancy Hanks.

An indentured servant was little better than a slave (and this was in the early 1800's when slavery was legal). Nancy Hanks "services" had been bought by Abraham and even though she was white she was to work in his house until her debt to the Enloes was paid. Evidently Abraham and Nancy had an affair and Nancy became pregnant and she gave birth to a son whom she named Abraham after his biological father.

But there was a problem. Abraham was already married. And the woman he was married to didn't approve of the affair, or to "little Abraham" running around. Either Nancy Hanks had to go or she had to go. Abraham Enloe, it is said, arranged for a man in wilds of Kentucky to marry Nancy Hanks and adopt little Abe. That man was Tom Lincoln. Little Abe was to grow up and be our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln.

... or at least that is how the story goes. But is it true? I think it would be neat if it were. I have no doubts that Sarah Enloe BELIEVED it to be true. Many of the Enloes in that area of the country still believe it to be true. In fact, it is a story that gets repeated every now and then, especially on the internet.

The evidence that it is true is speculative however. In 1895 a person interviewed several people. Sarah Enloe's uncle, Wesley, the only living son of Abraham Enloe repeated the story. There was a story from a man who had visited the White House during the Lincoln administration who claimed that Abraham Lincoln told him Abraham Enloe was his father. It was well known that Abraham Lincoln didn't look all that much like Tom Lincoln. Abe was tall and skinny. Tom was not-so-tall and stout. Pictures of Wesley Enloe DO bear a resemblance to Abe Lincoln.

But I am somewhat sad to say I don't believe the story. For the story to be true, Abraham Lincoln would have had to have been born about 4 years earlier than he is officially listed. But records show that he was in school at age 16 (age 20 if the Enloe story is true). It was not uncommon for kids in those days to be finishing their schooling at age 16, but it was almost unheard of for a person 20 years old to still be in school. Furthermore, Tom Lincoln's whereabouts CAN be traced during the years before he married Nancy Hanks. He never was in North Carolina. It seems very unlikely that Abraham Enloe could have ever met him.

Then finally, Tom Lincoln's father was named Abraham. So Abraham Lincoln it is more likely that Abraham Lincoln was named after his grandfather, than being named after Abraham Enloe.

1000 years ago:
My father's greatgrandmother was named Sarah Gragg. We can trace her ancestry back to Scotland. Her ancestors were of the Scottish clan, MacGregor. The MacGregor clan has a documented history stretching back over a thousand years.

A thousand years ago my living ancestory was Gregor Garbh of the Stout of Glenorchy. Gregor was the first cheif of the clan in Glenorchy. He was a warrior who distinguished himself fighting for Malcolm II, King of Scotland. Malcolm was succeeded by his son Duncan, whom you may have heard of. Duncan was murdered by his nephew, MacBeth. Duncan's son, another Malcolm fought with MacBeth. Gregor Garbh, old and unable to fight at the time, committed his clan to Malcolm's side. Fortunately for the MacGregor Clan Malcolm's side won.

The MacGregor clan can supposedly trace their genealogy back another thousand years, back through Cyllin one of the first kings of Briton. Cyllin was supposedly descended from Joseph of Arimathea. For the religious among you, you may be aware of that name.

According to the New Testament, Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the ruling Jewish priest in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus. He is the one who was given Jesus' body after the crucifixion. Jesus was buried in a tomb that Joseph had purchased for himself.

According to subsequent legend, Joseph left the holy lands and saild to Briton along with an entourage that included the Virgin Mary. He established the first Christian community in England. Among the many things included in his legend in Briton is the use of a miraculous staff that emitted a silver beam of light causing threatening natives to flee, and ... being the uncle of the Virgin Mary. If all that were actually true, and if the bible were actually true then I would have Jesus in my family tree and could trace my ancestry all the way back to Adam. Again that would be neat. But I don't plan to bet the farm on it being true.

10,000 years ago
I don't have a clue who my ancestors were at that time. But it is highly likely that if you read this and have any European ancestry at all, then we share some. Whoever they were they lived mostly in small bands of 50 to 200 people held together by family ties. There were a few larger settlements but not many. Most tools were still stone. The more technologically advanced of them were experimenting with copper and bronze. No one had yet invented the bellows to make fire hot enough to make iron products.

What little machinery there was, was limited to simple machines such as inclined planes, levers, wooden wheels and plows. Almost all work that was performed was performed by muscle power, either human or beast of burden. No written language was developed at that time.

100,000 years ago:
Our ancestors (no matter what your ancestry, we almost certainly shared common ancestors from that distant a past) while still Homo sapiens were sufficiently different from us to be given a distinct subspecies name Homo sapiens archaia. These people dealt only with stone tools. They had no cave art. And they lived in a world very different from what we live in today. The plains were covered with large herd animals. But there were also huge predators to such as cave bears, cave lions, and hyenas to avoid.

There was no agriculture. The people were almost certainly nomadic, following migrating herds. They were a hunter-gatherer people. Some studies suggest that this may not have been such a bad life. One such study suggested that in order to feed himself a person living at that time would only have needed to hunt three hours a day.

Other studies suggest that the diet was very varied. Over 300 different types of plants have been found around hearths at the time. Interestingly among the fossilized teeth dating back to that time, very few had cavities.

1,000,000 years ago:
Every living ancestor I had back then were the exact same ones that you had. And whoever they were, they weren't Homo sapiens. They were probably Homo erectus. The average Homo erectus would have had a noticeably smaller brain than we do now. But some could have passed for normal. They hunted. They made stone tools. They buried their dead. So perhaps they had religion. There is still some controversy over whether or not they had language.

10,000,000 years ago:
Any living ancestors I may have had at that time are not only shared by all humans today, they are shared by all chimps, gorillas and orangutans as well. These ancestors undoubtely had a full coat of fur. They lived in jungles and lived in trees much as the great apes do today.

100,000,000 years ago:
Our ancestors back then would be an interesting group. They would be among the mammal-like reptiles (or perhaps better phrased reptile-like mammals). Anyone looking at them would never believe their descendants would come to dominate the world as we do. These animals were forced to live in the shadows. They were dominated by the huge dinosaurs that roamed the terrain everywhere.

1,000,000,000 years ago:
Our ancestors were single-celled and lived in the oceans. The best thing that could be said for them was that they were eukaryotic. That is they had a true nucleus just like we do, and subcellular organelles. One of the subcellular organelles would likely have been mitochondria. If so then our ancestors were aerobic -- that is, they used oxygen.

Soon, a particular type of gene, the "hox" genes, would evolve. These genes would control development and make multicellular life not only possible, but capable of adapting to a wide range of habitats.

10,000,000,000 years ago:
We didn't have ancestors. In fact, the atoms that make us up were not yet created. The subatomic parts of the atoms that make us up were around in hydrogen atoms of large stars. These stars would eventually fuse those hydrogen atoms together to make up the atoms that make up us. These atoms would be released to free space in a supernova only to collapse under the force of gravity to make up our earth.

The whole universe was very young at that time, being less than 4 billion years old itself. It was probably a much brighter place. To my knowledge we do not see any galaxies dating back that old. But we do see some quasars. Quasars are small regions of distant space that are generating energies that can be larger than that created by a thousand galaxies. Some measurements suggest that this energy is emmanating from an area of about 3 light-months in diameter. Compare that with our galaxy, the Milky Way, thought to be a couple of hundred thousand light-years in diameter.

There was no 100,000,000,000 years ago ... at least not in this universe.

Cheers,

Darwin's Beagle

Share this post on:

 •    •    •    •    •