First a little tutorial on greats and grands and removals:
You will know that a grandparent is 2 generations before you. So, Grand=2 generations. Great=1 generation. Lavius Fillmore, below, is a 4th great granduncle to the author. That means 6 generations ago the subject was the brother of the direct ancester, in this case, Septa Fillmore.
The cousin and removed thing, using the Kellogg brothers. The author is the 5th cousin, 4 times removed from the Corn Flakes guys. This means that one of us (the Kellogs) is 5 generations away from our common ancester and I am an additional 4 generations away.
You may think, "wow, we're cool/special related to the Kellogg's" but my guess is there are many million more of us out there. I am 9 generations away and if each person in each generation had an average of 7 children the number of descendants would be 40,353,607.00, roughly 7 times the population
of Minnesota and about 1 million more than the 2020 population of California.
And, you might think each person having 7 children, on average, is a lot, but our Lt. Kellogg had 16 children that lived to adulthood and of the ones I could find data for, they had an average of 9 children each.
They weren't worrying about population control back then, rather they were thinking to populate their farms with workers! And they weren't aware of any way to limit the number of children except, I suppose, by abstinence. The rhythm method was even understood until about the 1930's.
Click on the name to learn more.
