40 Fun Facts About Genealogy

The word pedigree comes from an old French phrase for the foot of which bird, echoing a chart's branching lines?

Crane is the bird in pé de grue, the Anglo-Norman phrase that English speakers wore down into pedigree. The forked lines joining parents and children are said to resemble its splayed toes.

Which conqueror's male-line DNA is carried by about 16 million men across Asia, a 2003 genetic study suggested?

Genghis Khan was the study's suggested founder of a lineage found in about 8% of men from northeast China to Uzbekistan. Later ancient-DNA research has cast doubt on the link.

Which Oscar-winning actor is a distant cousin of Abraham Lincoln through the family of the president's mother, Nancy?

Tom Hanks descends from the same family as Nancy Hanks, the mother of the sixteenth president. The actor is also a distant relative of children's television host Fred Rogers, whom he played on screen.

Which English king's skeleton, dug up beneath a Leicester car park in 2012, was confirmed by DNA from living relatives?

Richard III was confirmed when mitochondrial DNA from the bones matched two descendants of his sister Anne of York, 17 and 19 generations on. He was the last English king to die in battle.

Which naturalist married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood and feared inbreeding had harmed their children's health?

Charles Darwin and Emma were both grandchildren of the potter Josiah Wedgwood. The couple had ten children, and whenever one fell ill he worried that the close family tie was to blame.

In which Nordic country do most people carry a patronymic such as Jónsdóttir in place of a fixed family surname?

Iceland gives most children a last name built from a parent's first name plus -son or -dóttir, so it changes with every generation. Even the telephone directory is alphabetised by first name.

What badly damaged the 1890 US census records in Washington in 1921, leading to a gap that frustrates family historians?

A fire in the Commerce Department building in January 1921 left the 1890 schedules scorched and soaked. Officials later approved the damaged remainder for disposal, so almost nothing survives.

Which California murder case was solved in 2018 after detectives uploaded crime-scene DNA to the site GEDmatch?

Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo was traced through distant relatives on the site who shared an ancestor from the 1800s. He was 72 when he was charged with eight murders.

Which 1976 Alex Haley bestseller about his ancestor Kunta Kinte set off an American boom in family history research?

Roots spent 22 weeks at number one on the New York Times list, and its 1977 television adaptation set off a rush to trace family trees. Haley was later sued for plagiarism over parts of the text.

Which immigration station in New York Harbor processed about 12 million arrivals between 1892 and 1954?

Ellis Island's first arrival was Annie Moore, a 17-year-old from Cork, on 1 January 1892. Officials there worked from the steamship lists, so the tale that they changed surnames is a myth.

The DNA testing company 23andMe takes its name from the 23 pairs of what in a human cell?

Chromosomes come in 23 pairs, one set from each parent, which is why a saliva sample can point to relatives on both sides of a family. Scientists miscounted the human total as 48 until 1956.

Which surname ranked first in the 2010 US census, shared by more than two million Americans?

Smith comes from the Old English word for someone who works in metal, and it was already recorded as a surname by about 975. It is also the most common surname in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

Which word marks a cousin from a different generation than yours, such as the child of your first cousin?

Removed counts the generations between two cousins: once for a parent's cousin or a cousin's child, twice when two generations lie between them. Cousins of the same generation take only a number.

Two people are second cousins when the closest ancestors they have in common are which relatives?

Great-grandparents are the shared link, which makes second cousins the grandchildren of two siblings. First cousins meet one generation lower, and each further degree climbs one generation higher.

Which disease did doctors mean when an old death certificate gave the cause as consumption?

Tuberculosis earned the name consumption because the illness seemed to consume its victims as they wasted away. In the 1800s it caused an estimated quarter of all deaths in Europe.

Which calendar did Britain and its American colonies adopt in 1752, skipping eleven days of September?

Gregorian dating replaced the Julian calendar, so records from before the switch are labelled Old Style. George Washington was born on 11 February by the old count and 22 February by the new.

Which trade did an ancestor follow if an old census listed his occupation as cooper?

Barrel maker is the meaning: coopers bent heated wooden staves into casks, tubs and buckets. The word goes back to cupa, a Latin word for a barrel.

Which French word is printed before a married woman's maiden name in records and obituaries?

Née is the feminine form of the French for born, so a record reading Mary Jones née Clark is giving her surname at birth. Né is the rarer masculine form.

Queen Elizabeth II and her husband were third cousins through their shared descent from which earlier British monarch?

Victoria was an ancestor of both: Elizabeth descended from her eldest son, Edward VII, and her husband from her daughter Alice. So many of her descendants wore crowns that she was nicknamed the grandmother of Europe.

Which US president gave away his niece Eleanor at her 1905 wedding to her distant cousin Franklin?

Theodore Roosevelt stood in for his late brother, the bride's father, and the date was picked because he would be in New York for the St Patrick's Day parade. Eleanor did not even have to change her surname.

A 1998 DNA study tied a descendant of Sally Hemings's youngest son to the male line of which US president?

Thomas Jefferson was represented in the test by descendants of his paternal uncle Field, whose Y-DNA matched that of a descendant of Eston Hemings. Most historians have since accepted his paternity.

Which British prime minister came from the same aristocratic Spencer family as Princess Diana?

Winston Churchill was born a Spencer-Churchill, the senior branch that holds the dukedom of Marlborough. Diana came from the junior branch, the Spencers of Althorp.

Which survey of England, made for William the Conqueror, recorded who held every manor and what it was worth?

Domesday Book got its name because its record of who held which land was as final as the Last Judgement. Doom was then simply the Old English word for a law or ruling.

Which church operates FamilySearch, a free website holding billions of digitised family history records?

Latter-day Saints gather records partly so that religious ordinances can be performed for relatives who have died. The effort began in 1894 as the Genealogical Society of Utah.

Members of a lineage society founded at Plymouth in 1897 must document descent from a passenger on which ship?

Mayflower passengers numbered 102 when the ship reached America in 1620, and the society records the family lines that descend from them. Its first chapter was formed in New York City in 1894.

Which Gospel opens with a genealogy that runs forward from Abraham to Jesus?

Matthew starts with Abraham and works forward, while the only other Gospel family tree runs backwards from Jesus to Adam. The two lists even disagree on the name of Joseph's father.

Which European dynasty's jutting jaw has been linked to generations of marriages between close relatives?

Habsburg rulers married within the family so often, for political advantage, that the dynasty was almost unmatched in its inbreeding. The long chin can be followed through their portraits.

In which country's traditional naming custom does a child take two surnames, the father's first and then the mother's?

Spain's custom also means women keep their own surnames at marriage, a gift to anyone tracing a maternal line. Since 1999 parents may choose the order, but nearly all put the father's first.

Which broadcaster launched, in 2004, the celebrity ancestry series Who Do You Think You Are?

BBC viewers made the first series the highest-rated programme on BBC Two that year. NBC launched an American version in 2010, with Lisa Kudrow as an executive producer.

Which scholar began hosting a PBS ancestry series in 2012 in which celebrity guests receive a book of life?

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a Harvard literary critic and historian who often uses his own family tree as an example on screen. Professional genealogists compile each guest's book.

Which public announcements, read out in church on three Sundays before a wedding, often appear in parish registers?

Banns let anyone who knew of an impediment, such as an existing marriage or too close a kinship, speak up before the ceremony. The word comes from a Middle English term for a proclamation.

Which chief minister of Henry VIII ordered every English parish in 1538 to record its baptisms, marriages and burials?

Thomas Cromwell's order was not about doctrine: the government wanted better knowledge of the country's population. Parish registers begin that year, four years after the break with Rome.

Which kind of DNA, inherited from both parents and all recent ancestors, do family-matching test kits mainly read?

Autosomal DNA recombines in every generation, so a test returns matches of either sex on any branch of the tree. The same reading is used to estimate a person's ethnic mix.

Which coding system files surnames by how they are pronounced, so that Robert and Rupert share the code R163?

Soundex was patented in 1918, and Depression-era relief workers used it to index several US censuses. Each surname becomes its first letter followed by three digits.

Which unit, each worth roughly a million DNA base pairs, tells genetic genealogists how much two matches share?

Centimorgans honour the geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan and are written cM in a list of DNA matches. The more of them two testers have in common, the closer their relationship is likely to be.

Which file format, developed by the operators of FamilySearch, lets rival programs exchange a family tree?

GEDCOM is short for Genealogical Data Communication and is saved as plain text, which is why one program can open a tree built in another. Version 7.0 was released in 2021.

Which former fort at Manhattan's southern tip was America's first immigration station, from 1855 to 1890?

Castle Garden had been a 6,000-seat entertainment venue before it began registering newcomers. More than 7.5 million people landed there, and the fort survives in Battery Park as Castle Clinton.

Which German-named numbering system gives a person's father double that person's number and the mother one more?

Ahnentafel means ancestor table. The starting person is number 1 and the parents are 2 and 3, so a genealogist can work out any forebear's place in the tree from a single figure.

Which US agency opens each census's household records to the public only after 72 years have passed?

National Archives staff put the 1950 returns online on 1 April 2022, exactly 72 years after census day. Until that point other federal agencies can see only the statistics.

A television programme linked the DNA of a local history teacher to which ancient skeleton from a Somerset cave?

Cheddar Man and teacher Adrian Targett both belonged to mitochondrial haplogroup U5, a line passed down from mothers. The match cannot prove direct descent, since many local people would share it.