Myths of descent

It is common to ascribe to someone the characteristics of a specific ancestor.  Why would this particular one matter and not all the others?  As I have pointed out before genetic similarity decrease by half for each degree of relationship.  When enough generations have passed being related does not matter anymore.  Usually nothing particular is shared with someone having lived centuries ago.  We could as well share genes with unrelated individuals.  It is just a matter of probability.

The exception is if descent is only on the father’s or the mother’s side.  The Y-chromosome is inherited unmixed from dad to all sons.  In the same way mitochondria are inherited from mum to all children.  It happens in rare cases that people inherit mitochondria from their dad.  The children then get a mix of such from both parents.  Anyway, the mitochondria rarely matters for characteristics a person has.  Neither does the Y-chromosome matter much.

A good example of this is king Felipe VI of Spain.  He could very well have the same Y-chromosome as France’ first king.  Since historically documented descent is only on the father’s side this in particular has been passed on.  At least unless the fatherhood has been false at least once.  In contrast he does not share anything particular with Sweden’s first king.  This because documented relation is on the mother’s side for two generations.  Óláfr Skautkonungr’s daughter married the prince of Novgorod.  Her daughter married Robert’s great-great-grandson Henri.  After another few generations being related did not matter anymore.

I consider distant descent mostly as a piece of trivia.  If it is only on the father’s side or only on the mother’s it can be useful sometimes.  For example to identify a skeleton in an unmarked grave.  Either it was not intended the grave should be found so easily.  Or the tombstone has later been destroyed.  Being related on their mother’s side has contributed to identification of royalties.  In the same way being related on their father’s side has determined historical fatherhoods.  We now know that Thomas Jefferson had children outside marriage.  He had them with Sally Hemings after his wife had died.

Another myth is that a person has a limited number of descendants.  It think this is a mix up of descendant and legal heir.  Most societies count an extended family either only on the father’s or on the mother’s side.  Such has historically determined who has got to juridically inherit.  Which made people not to think of relatives without the right to inherit existing.  In addition comes a poor grasp of human population’s scale.  We then have to learn to think beyond our everyday experience.  Otherwise everything is imagined as paltry.

This difference has consequences for people which lived long ago.  Ether someone’s descendants go extinct within a few generations.  Or their number increase exponentially over time.  Götstaff Erichson lived 500 years ago.  Today there are 100.000 people documented to be descended from him.  These also include me and my relatives on my father’s side.  His undocumented descendants could be several times as numerous.  Borjigin Temüdjin and Karlo the Great are thought to have many million descendants.  Most present-day Chinese likely descend from Kong Qui.  I think this applies to a great deal of Koreans too.  There are probably a non-negligible number in China’s and Taiwan’s ethnic minorities.  Some members of the Kong clan could carry his Y-chromosome.  (Kong is the family name in the world which has survived the longest.)  But otherwise it does not matter at all.

Please note it did not happen as many nowadays think.  Monarchs and princes specifically can’t have conceived that many.  Far too often it was a matter of the men of single families.  This in countries with hundreds of thousands or millions of inhabitants.  Instead it was landowners making their female employees pregnant.  Or enslaved women to the extent such occurred.  (Sally Hemmings was Thomas Jefferson slave.)  It is enough that some of them had a handful of children each born outside marriage.  Such undocumented descendants have accumulated over hundreds of years.  Just accumulation of small steps some seems to have trouble grasping.

Many myths about children of celebrities arose during the Industrialisation.  The fraction of children born by the unmarried then increased considerably.  At the same time people still believed them to be bad people.  This just because their parents were not married when they were born.  (Did they become bad people this was out of absence of a second parent.)  Some unmarried mothers tried to counteract bad reputation by saying dad was a celebrity.  There might be an idea of such a child’s unicity too.  The child is supposed to have been to only one the celebrity had outside marriage.  Did he have illegitimate children there could very well have been several.  On the other hand it is not sensible there were loads of such.  Few guys are fertile before 15 – 16 years of age.  So it is not particularly plausible that celebrities become fathers before 16.  In some cases it is documented he was not there.  At least not during the time span when she could have gotten pregnant.

Not only royalties were the subject of this.  The author Alexandre Dumas was claimed to have hundreds of children.  To me that is patently absurd.  I can’t help wondering how many of those gals had met him at all.  Or even know he was one forth African.  His paternal grandmother was a survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade.  Her white owner was Alexandre’s paternal grandfather.  This slave-owner got found of his illegitimate son.  The mulatto was freed by his father which saw to that he got an education.  Then he moved to France where he married a white.  This way the country got a naturally born author of noticeably recent African descent.

It is theoretically possible for a man to have hundreds of children.  However, this would be under circumstances which can’t be applied to Europe of later periods.  If the parents must have sex this only applies to royal harems.  There dozens of gals were isolated from their teens up to they were thirty.  Gals sent to harems were not though to have had sex previously.  As a rule no-one other than the monarch could make any of the shut-in pregnant.  There are several cases of such which are thought to have had hundreds of children.  In contrast I doubt cases like the Polish king August II.  He is claimed to have become dad of at least 360 children.  We are talking about one without opportunity to isolate dozens of gals.  The risk of contacting sexually transmitted diseases would have been considerable.  It can very well be imagined they had sex with others at the same time too.  It those cases their fatherhood is unknown.

In modern times some men has become dad of hundreds of children by donating sperm.  Usually these children don’t know who their sperm donor was.  This means they by mistake may themselves have children with half-siblings.  Which means overhanging risk of hereditary diseases.  Such ought to be possible to avoid.  Nowadays people try to stop that though limiting rules.  In many countries there are legal limits for how many is allowed to donate to.  The alternative is all children being told who their father is.  Do they tell it to one they date such incest-children could be avoided.

How many children women can have is limited by multiple births.  Such use to be rare but there are exceptions.  There are at least six cases of women with 30 – 33 children.  In most such cases two or more children has been born at the very same occasion.  The record holder is one from Uganda who has given birth to 44 children.  She was handed over to an adult man to rape when she was only 12.  Her first child was born when she was 13.  A genetic error resulted in loads of twins, triplets and quadruplets.  36 of her 44 children were part of multiple births.  Not until after he abandoned her did she get the chance of sterilisation.  Now she is dependant on charity to sustain her younger ones.

Rapports of even more children are insufficiently documented.  Same applies to women with claimed 42 – 35 children.  These could be misreported or in some cases hoaxes.  Adopted or foster children may have been misunderstood as biological.  Half-siblings on their father’s side may have been mistaken for having the same mother.  Number of children many have been exaggerated for the sake of social status.  Grandchildren may have been registered as their maternal grandmother’s own children.  That to hide a daughter having given birth unmarried.  I think this is the explanation in many cases when women are claimed to have given birth unreasonably old.  Unless the mum’s age has been exaggerated.

Many descendants does not have to mean single ones had loads of children.  To take previously mentioned examples Götstaff had eleven children.  Nine of these reached adulthood and all had children themselves.  It seems to be unclear how many Temüdjin had.  Since he was polygamous there could have been dozens.  Karlo had ten children which all reached adulthood and themselves had children.  I have never seen any statement of Qui having more than three.  But many documented descendants on their father’s side were landowners.  Moreover, one has to consider how long ago he lived.  We are talking about a person who lived more than 2,500 years ago.

 

Uploaded on the 11th of September 2025.