41. In more remote generations, the probable biological
influence of the ancestor becomes practically nil. Thus Americans who
trace their descent to some royal personage of England or the Continent,
a dozen generations ago, may get a certain amount of spiritual
satisfaction out of the relationship, but they certainly can derive
little real help, of a hereditary kind, from this ancestor. And when
one goes farther back,--as to William the Conqueror, who seems to rank
with the Mayflower immigrants as a progenitor of many descendants--the
claim of descent becomes really a joke. If 24 generations have elapsed
between the present and the time of William the Conqueror, every
individual living to-day must have had living in the epoch of the Norman
conquest not less than sixteen million ancestors. Of course, there was
no such number of people in all England and Normandy, at that time,
hence it is obvious that the theoretical number has been greatly reduced
in every generation by consanguineous marriages, even though they were
between persons so remotely related that they did not know they were
related. C. B. Davenport, indeed, has calculated that most persons of the
old American stock in the United States are related to each other not
more remotely than thirtieth cousins, and a very large proportion as
closely as fifteenth cousins.
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