A Family Tree of all Mankind - part 1

What does the family tree of all of humanity look like?

      This series of posts is dedicated to displaying my family tree that I've researched and compiled over the course of about 10 years. I began roughly in 2002, and worked on this project on and off until 2009 when I reached a good stopping point and attempted to print out a book. But soon I discovered more ancestors and began adding them in again, and I also got married and started adding in my wife's ancestors too, so by 2012 my tree had grown about twice as big. Anything I had previously printed out - all the pretty looking pdfs, trees, and charts etc. were already outdated. My book printing ambitions didn't work out so well anyway. I got the first chapter out, and some of the smaller last chapters out, but I got hung up on the massive lump in the middle. You see the problem is, that this tree is so ridiculously massively huge and complex, that working with it seriously borders along insanity. After literal reams of paper and ink I finally realized that it doesn't make sense to strive to produce a physically printed-out copy of the tree in any form, be it book, or chart or any two dimensional format conceivable. The best way for it to be displayed is on the internet within a hyperlinked network. Which I DID do once, on a different website which subsequently crashed. And it took such a ridiculous amount of time to create, that for technical reasons that no one wants to hear, it is not currently available. Most of this text in these blogs here are copied from my other website, so I apologize for any links that are still dead. But even without the actual interactive tree, I still recommend anyone to keep reading this dialogue to understand it. There are insights to be gleaned here that I know nearly everyone misunderstands about evolution and ancestry.

      First, let me tell you about what this project looks like. This tree in its entirety is STRICTLY AN ASCENDING TREE, as opposed to a descending one. Most people think of a family tree as starting from some individual in the past and mapping out his or her descendants. That is a descending tree, and indeed most family trees are of the descending genre, or maybe a combination of both. But this one is an ascending tree. I'm going to say it again, because I cannot stress the importance of this enough. My family tree is an ASCENDING tree ONLY. And as such, EVERY person herein named is a direct ancestor with a direct and complete unbroken line all the way to myself in the present. That means they are a great^n-grandfather or a great^n-grandmother directly. And anyone who does not meet the criteria of being a direct ancestor is omitted. If a family relation is known but they are an uncle, aunt, cousin, or sibling, they are not incuded (unless they are also an ancestor). This is necessary because I can only devote so much time to this project, and I have to draw the line somewhere. In addition to the ancestors' names, this tree also contains info (if it is known) for the date of birth, location of birth, date of marriage, location of marriage, date of death, location of death, and one other data entry called "aka". There are no photos or other media. No history nor stories are given about the lives of the individuals - just the bare bones here. I used the Family Tree Maker 2005 software to compile it all, but it is displayed here as an archive of HTML pages with a network of links, produced via a GEDCOM. Some statistics of the project:

Number of different unique individuals: 24,523. (ancestors only)
Total number of marriages: 9,126.
Average lifespan: 55 years, 7 months.
Longest line of generations: 186.
Average time in between generations: 28.5 years.
Earliest listed ancestors: Adam and Eve.
Total number of different surnames: 8,245.
Amount of skepticism you probably have right now: A lot.

Family Tree Maker 2005 only allows me to work with a maximum of 99 generations at a time. And it irritatingly also will not handle dates prior to 100 AD, so the "date" entries for those earlier times are found in the Location field instead.

Here (and also below) is a rough road-map sketch to help guide you around a bit (This will be useful to "see" what the tree looks like as a whole, but I understand it's a bit overwhelming. I will explain this better as we go). Also you may download my master-index of all named ancestors in a Microsoft word .rtf format to help navigate if you like (This will not at all be useful anymore, since the interactive tree isn't here).

Follow along with me in this dialogue and I'll take you on a tour of the whole project, while providing potentially paradigm challenging insights and occasionally controversial commentary!

Continued on page 2.

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