This image comes from an article in a 1977 issue of The Ensign, publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Even asking Grandma Google 🙂 I could not find a better image for this post…………..

QUESTION: What really is world history? Isn’t it the story of cousins who could just not get along? (That made you smile, didn’t it?) Yes, we living today are cousins of a sort because populations have expanded and contracted as wars, fires, floods, plagues and other disasters impacted them. 

It is estimated that the Black Death plague in England in 1348-1377 carried off 40% of the population. That same plague alone in Europe in 1720-1721 claimed 20 million people. 

Many families were completely wiped out; many surnames died out; many families were left with no descendants. You and I survived because somehow, miraculously, our ancestral line survived. Or at least one or two of them did. 

Quote from this article: “For example, in the U.S. in 1960 there was about an 80% chance that a man would have no descendants with his last name 13 generations later. The chance of a kinship line dying out depends on the death rate of the society and the number of children in each family. Even in a society were couples have many children, there is a 20-30% chance that a family line will die out after ten generations or so.”

What does this mean to us as we search out our family history? It means we must realize that many of the family lines existing in the year 1700 have no male descendants bearing that family name living today. 

THOUGHT: A typical extended pedigree chart can comprise 100 or more surnames and if each person’s tree was totally unique to him/her, in 30 generations (about 1000 years) every person would have two billion ancestors….. for more people than there were in the world in A.D. 1000. Could that really be so? No way.

Somewhere along the line our ancestors were already related to each other, marrying 5th, 6th or 7th cousins without realizing that. So instead of having MORE ancestors the further back we trace, eventually we will have fewer and fewer. 

And if our ancestors wee related, albeit distantly, the same must be true of all of us. Again quoting from the article, “As we research our genealogies we find our pedigrees mingling with those of hundreds of thousands of others until we are all traveling on the same broad road of ancestry back to the fathers of the human race.” 

The diamond pedigree reminds us most surely of the brotherhood of all mankind. 

For what years can we access census records in England?  There are nine  censuses available: 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911 and 1921. Sadly, the 1931 census was totally destroyed by fire and no census was taken in 1941 due to World War II. (In 1939 there was taken a National Registry and ID cards issued.)

Found it interesting that the English censuses included the name for each person in the house whereas U.S. censuses didn’t begin doing that until 1850. 

If you cannot read the info in that last paragraph, just Google that title. Tips to realize and remember:

• English counties are also known as shires (Worcestershire, Somersetshire, etc.) comparable to our U.S. states.
• Ind. independent or having own means; also may be reported as gent/gentleman.
• Pensioner usually referred to someone retired from the Army
• Scholar meant the child or person was attending school
• Ag Lab mean agricultural laborer
• F.S./ M.S. meant female/male servant

Just for fun, using www.freecen.org.uk I looked by my mother’s maiden name, GURNEY, in the 1841 census. Viola! There were 104 hits!!  And I’ve never explored them!!!