The citizen. (Frederick City, Md.) 1895-1923, 1901-02-01
The Pyramid Of Ancestry.
FACTS WHICH SHOULD
TEND TO MODIFY PRIDE
OF DESCENT.
Work Of the Law Of Geometli-
cal Progression - Every
body Has Many Thous-
ands Of Cousins.

claim of those Americans who at
tempt to obtain social prestige
by tracing back their descent to
some Younger son Of an English
or Scotch noble family? Not
long since an acquaintance of
mine said to me, with an air Of
pride;
Il can trace my ancestry to
my great-great- grandfather'S
great great grandfather. He was
a cavalier and fought under
Charles L.
"And what does that amount
to - | answered him. That was
the eighth generation before YOU
and in that generation YOU had
12S forefatherS and 12S fore
mothers and You can account but
for one of them. just l-256th Of
your ancestry in that generation.
Among the l21 men OF whom YOU
have never heard there may have
been several who were hung for
murder, burglary or sheep steal
ing, for all that You know or can
ever hope to know. Nor can YOU
tell how many disreputable char
acters there may have been among
the lbs women. And you must
remember, too, that you had 81
forenothers in the seventh gener-
alton and 30 in the fifth, all of
them nearer to YOU than that cav
alier; You must account for them
as we'll"
Yet, of course, one should be
glad that his near lineal and
collateral kin have been and are
honest men and virtuouS women:
but line must be drawn some.
where, and that not many genera
tons back, beyond which there
is no such thing as good birth or
bad birth, because it is all both
good and bad. When anyone
begins to boast that he comes of
ga long line Of proud ancestry
he can be contracted at once, be
cause there is no such thing as
ga long line of ancestry" ones
ancestry cannot be represented
by a cline" but by an inverted
pyramid. Every one of us comes
not of one, but of many hundreds
and thousands of long lines Of
ancestry, some of them proud,
perhaps, and others with no cause
for pride, but rather the reverse.
1t will not do to try to follow
them all too far back. Some of
the many will surely lead to Il
dungeon of he Newgate Prison.
or it may be to the Tyburn gal
lOws-tree. We cannot pin our
faith to the one cavalier and ig.
more all the others, as my friend
was trying to do, because it is
natures plan that all the good
and all the bad of the race should
be mixed up in each one of us.
Thus there is hardly IA mathe-
NAUTICAL possibility that the aver
age person of English descent. no
matter i'll what part of the world
he lives, is not connected with
the Norman house by one or more
of the thousands and millions of
lines that run upward from each
descent and downward from each
ancestor His heraldic shield
may perhaps be crossed by the
"bar sinister" but il one is dis
posed to feel proud of descent
from the royal Normans a small
thing like that ought not to deter
him, because the Conqueror him
self was the son of an unmarried
woman. And it may be that his
blood contains only the millionth
part of the "blood of the Con.
queror;" but neither should the
infiniteSimal fraction make him
hang his head, because Queen
Victoria herself could claim no
more. She was by lineal descent
in the twenty sixth generation,
10y the shortest legitimate line,
from William |, and the twenty
sixth power of one half is one
siXty.Seven millionth, or there
aboutS, exactly how much does
not greatly concern us. OfcourSe
there have been many intermar-
riages i'll her family, each one of
which would increase the size of
the fraction; but even so, its
value would be infnitesimal.
And the law of geometIical
progression works both ways
upward and downward. Each
average couple must have more
than two children, and each of
those two must have more than
two children, and so on, otherwise
the population of their country
would diminish. The progression
is by the "power of "a mum Der. "
as the mathematicians say; that
is by a number continually mul
tiplied into itself, au1 not bv
mere addition. And so it is with
every indiyi1ualiS eoIlatnral bin