{"id":35748,"date":"2014-02-10T01:23:36","date_gmt":"2014-02-10T01:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35748"},"modified":"2014-02-10T01:23:36","modified_gmt":"2014-02-10T01:23:36","slug":"are-you-my-cousin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35748","title":{"rendered":"Are You My Cousin?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are You My Cousin?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2014-01-31<\/p>\n

A. J. Jacobs<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

I love<\/em> my family, but I\u2019m glad I don\u2019t have to buy birthday presents for all my cousins. I\u2019d be bankrupt within a week.<\/p>\n

My family tree sprawls far and wide. It\u2019s not even a tree, really. More like an Amazonian forest. At last count, it was up to nearly 75 million family members. In fact, there\u2019s a good chance you\u2019re on some far-flung branch of my tree, and if you aren\u2019t, you probably will be soon. It\u2019s not really my tree. It\u2019s our tree.<\/p>\n

The previously staid world of genealogy is in the midst of a controversial revolution. A handful of websites have turbocharged family trees with a collaborative, Wikipedia-like approach. You upload your family tree, and then you can merge your tree with another tree that has a cousin in common. After that, you merge and merge again. This creates vast webs with hundreds of thousands \u2014 or millions \u2014 of cousins by blood and marriage, provided you think the links are accurate. One site, Geni, has what it calls the World Family Tree, with about 75 million relatives in more than 160 countries and all seven continents, including Antarctica…<\/p>\n

…My journey started a few months ago. I got an email from a stranger named Jules Feldman who lives on a kibbutz in Israel. He had read one of my books. He wrote: \u201cWe have in our database about 80,000 relatives of yours. You are an eighth cousin of my wife who, in my opinion, is a fine lady.\u201d I\u2019m also, he said, related to Karl Marx<\/a> and several European aristocrats.<\/p>\n

The email had a bit of a creepy National Security Agency<\/a> privacy-invasion vibe. But it was also, in a strange way, profoundly comforting. There I was, alone in my office, connected to 80,000 other humans. In a world where extended families lose touch as they spread across time zones, this seemed remarkable…<\/p>\n

…Last year, Yaniv Erlich<\/a>, a fellow at the Whitehead Institute at M.I.T.<\/a>, presented preliminary results of his project FamiLinx, which uses Big Data from Geni\u2019s tree to track the distribution of traits. His work has yielded a fascinating picture of human migration.<\/p>\n

Second, a megatree might just make the world a kinder place. I notice that I feel more warmly about people I know are distant cousins. I recently figured out that I\u2019m an 11th cousin four times removed of the TV personality Judge Judy Sheindlin<\/a>. I\u2019d always found her grating. But when I discovered our connection, I softened. She\u2019s probably a sweetheart underneath the bluster.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a trivial example, I know. But imagine how someone from the Ku Klux Klan<\/a> might feel when he connects with his African-American relatives. They won\u2019t be singing Kumbaya<\/a>, but could it nudge him toward more tolerance? I hope so…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are You My Cousin? The New York Times 2014-01-31 A. J. Jacobs I love my family, but I\u2019m glad I don\u2019t have to buy birthday presents for all my cousins. I\u2019d be bankrupt within a week. My family tree sprawls far and wide. It\u2019s not even a tree, really. More like an Amazonian forest. At […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,8],"tags":[16939,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-35748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-media-archive","tag-a-j-jacobs","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}