What is it about relations?Why do we have to have so many?
Where the hell do they all come from?
Seems to me that they keep crawling out from under the floorboards when you are not looking . I'm sure the last time I looked at my tree, there weren't that many people on there. I have a theory that even the dead ones are still procreating , filling up the small corners of the tree . They surely must think that there are those corners, that they missed, all of those hundreds of years ago. And as they have little else to do.
So the tree that I left on that lazy Sunday afternoon , you know the one ate too much for lunch and the snooze monster found you, just as you were getting to the boring bits of the hints for your great Aunt three times removed on your Great grandmothers husbands side. The one you're not quite sure of, but looks like she stood the siege of Maffeking all on her own, has better whiskers than a walrus and makes Keith Richard look fresh faced . Yes that's the tree, I am sure that before I left it it had 18,294 people on it. How come then that now I'm logged on today and all of a sudden it has 18,499 people on it. Either the theory of procreation from beyond the grave is healthy. I miscounted, or Ancestry.co.uk has an automatic entry clerk working on my behalf filling in the blanks.
I know they are big into their genealogy over in the states but this goes beyond the pail . I know I have trees within trees over the other side of the pond. Some of the relationships go so far that the calculator cannot compute it and comes up with the father of someone you know is a distant rellie as No relation but the bit it just spewed out for his daughter was longer than Genesis Chapter 5 . You know the one where people were begatting all over the place. And you are 115th in line of a relationship calculator.
How in gods name did it get to 18000+ anyway I am sure that locked away in the annals of the building that is Ancestry HQ in Salt Lake City Utah is my own data entry clerk just entering my rellies because they are big on genealogy. Maybe they are returning the favour for all my paltry efforts at the world archive project . You know the one that's more boring than the great Aunt I mentioned before. The one who has to have a wall handy at all times, just so she can have a lean to take the weight off the earth, so it keeps on its axis.
Maybe the two are linked ( no not Great aunt and Keith Richard) my tree and the World Project. Maybe what ever I enter on the world thingy goes straight in to the corners of my tree.
So maybe lurking away in that odd 205 extras added to my tree is some felon from Dorset or a publican from Dewsbury who applied for a licence in 1800 and dot, or a Liverpool crew member from the start of the last century.
I was trying to add up the other day (no sniggering at the back especially Steve Gray in 4g at my old school god that's some time ago) but I digress. Back to the counting if I spent 10 minutes on each relative in my tree that's one hundred and eighty thousand minutes, over 15 years or thirty thousand hours . One and a quarter thousand days .or just over 3.4 years . So over the last 15 years I have spent just under a quarter of my life just on my tree . Worse than that if you take off time for sleep it works out at one third of each day for the last 15 years.
Working pout that the average salary is 28 thousand a year I have been fully employed each week on my tree (7x 5hrs= 35) so my tree is worth about £420,000 . That should be enough for the kids inheritance.
