Just watched another episode of this very interesting TV show. Naturally, it tends to get overly dramatic and opinionated at times, but so do most TV shows today. Tonight's guests were Khandi Alexander, Ben Jealous and Ben Affleck. It turns out that all of them had ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War. Khandi had both slaves and slave owners in her ancestry. Ben Jealous, despite having headed the NAACP, had a white father and a black mother so his DNA analysis indicated he was 74 percent European. They showed Ben Affleck a chart starting from an English ancestor that diverged in such a way that it proved he and Matt Damon are 10th cousins once removed.
This is a very well produced show that I would recommend to all.
10th cousin relationship is no big deal. Any two people who had ancestors in the same colony in the 1600's or early 1700's have a good chance of being at least that closely related.
I've met two 10th cousins in this small city through casual conversations about genealogy, all of us descended from the same Rhode Island families, and wouldn't be surprised if there were several more. One of those also turned out to be an 8th cousin by another connection.
I rate genealogical knowledge on a scale of generations. You get a half-point for knowing the history of each parent. You get a quarter point for each grandparent. Back in colonial times, each ancestor is worth maybe 1/2048 of a generation point.
Then there is the question of whether you are biologically related to all those people on record. There has been a lot of hanky-panky even in historical times. And many orphaned children were raised by friends and distant relatives and may have represented themselves to be the children of those who raised them.
Neighbors and orphans
My late mother was orphaned with her siblings in early childhood and the four children were taken in by two Irish old maids that raised them all to adulthood. I'm 100% French, but there's a very strong family heritage from Ireland due to Aunt Liz and Aunt Maggie Hearne.
