The Game of Online Genealogy

   When I began to look at my family history in 2008 I was earnest about finding accurate records of my relatives as far back as I could.  I had many family stories and hundreds of photos with which to begin. Then I found Geni.com.  After entering my family's essential information, name, where and when they were born, date of death, and in some cases, a photo, I started to find relatives who I did not enter into the system. My family was growing.
   The next six years found me entering an occasional distant relative I had neglected.  But more often, I started collecting new relatives that other people had entered.  I possess family records that go back six generations in three lines of my family.  The other lines were not that extensive.  Just for context, six generations got me back to the 17th century, in terms of time. What the millions of people participating on Geni.com did for me was to trace my family back to the 13th century or further.
   I learned a few tricks for searching for relatives like Googling possible relatives, then plugging them into Geni. This way I found how I was related to Confucius and even Biblical figures.  Let me stop, at this point, and say that not all of Geni's records are accurate. Surprise!  Of course many are inaccurate. When I found the first King that was my 21st Great Grandfather, I knew there were inaccuracies. It didn't matter.  Searching for interesting relatives like William the Conqueror and Charlemagne became the game and it did not matter how accurate the results were.
   Geni made it easy to collect relatives.  I stopped collecting 18th Great Grandparents when I had more than eighty.  Then I started doing the math.  Typically, people have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great grandparents, and on and on. At your tenth great-grandparents, you could potentially have 4096.  At eighteenth, the number is 524288.  That is, people could have as many as a half million or more eighteenth great grandparents.  The real number is impossible to know because at a certain (unknown) point, the same person can be a great grandparent and great great grandparent at the same time from different relative perspectives.  It can be extremely complicated.  You'll have to trust me, or ask a real genealogist.

                                                      Pope Gregory X 1210-1276


The game continued when I found that you could pull up your family tree, horizontally, on Geni.com, and then follow one line as far as there were relatives.  It didn't surprise me when I traced my line back to Ostrogotha "The Patient", King of the Goths.  My family can be very uncivilized.  But when I found I could directly trace myself back to Pope Gregory X, 1210-1274, my 23rd Great Grandfather, then I knew it was all silliness and I had to treat this as a game only.  I hope all of the genealogists forgive me.