One man’s quest to find family turns up a riot of cousins, and a new reason to help others.
When I say that I consider Rotary to be family, I’m not speaking metaphorically. I recently discovered that I have hundreds of cousins in Rotary clubs all over the world. Even thousands. I also found out, to my delight, that I’m related to many of Rotary’s most famous members, including honorary Rotarians Walt Disney and Franklin Roosevelt – and Paul Harris.
Granted, some of my family ties are looser than others. Consider the late Neil Armstrong, an honorary Rotarian, who is my aunt’s first cousin five times removed’s husband’s second great-niece’s husband’s nephew’s wife’s second cousin twice removed. Still, he’s family – as is everyone reading this article.
Let me explain: For the first time, as a result of amazing advances in DNA testing and online family trees, you can see how you’re related to almost any other person on earth. It’s the ultimate social network. Sister Sledge was right: We are family.
My family tree, which I am building with the help of thousands of other researchers, is the biggest on record, with a jaw-dropping 80 million relatives and growing fast. It’s more Amazonian forest than tree. Within a decade, my family tree could include almost all seven billion people living today.
That’s a lot of cousins. I’m hoping they won’t all ask to borrow money or crash on my couch. But I am optimistic that a global family tree will make us better people. My admittedly quixotic hope is that it will remind us that we share 99.9 percent of our DNA, and that we need to start treating one another with kindness – because we are all family.
I started building my family tree about a year ago, when I got an email from a reader. (I’m the author of several books, most on projects that overwhelm my life and test the patience of my lovely wife. The Year of Living Biblically tells how I tried to follow all the rules of the Bible, from the Ten Commandments to growing a ridiculously bushy beard.) The reader said, “You don’t know me. But I’m your 12th cousin.” His family tree has 80,000 people on it, he said, including me, Karl Marx, and several European aristocrats.
My first thought was, “OK, this guy is about to ask me to wire $10,000 to his Nigerian bank account.” But he didn’t. It turned out that my 12th cousin is part of an online genealogy revolution that includes new websites such as Geni, FamilySearch, and WikiTree. Instead of building your own small tree, you join a crowd working on a shared tree that connects millions worldwide through blood and marriage.
When you input your family tree, the website will search its databases to see if a branch of your tree overlaps with another tree on the site. And if it does, you can combine trees. And then combine again. Eventually you’ll link up with mega-monster family trees, and you can trace your lineage to kings, presidents, famous explorers, and your best friend from kindergarten.
Over the past several months, I’ve been traveling the country to spread the word and meet with cousins both close and far-flung. I flew to Houston to talk to former President George H.W. Bush, who is just 18 steps away from me on the tree. I told him he’s linked to Bill Clinton by 12 steps, which made him and his wife happy. “We’ve always thought of President Clinton as a son from another mother,” Barbara Bush told me. (President Bush is also a George Clooney fan, so he was happy to hear that the Gravity star is a relative.)
I met actor Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter, and who is a mere 32 degrees away from me. I told him he is related to Albert Einstein but also to serial cannibalist Jeffrey Dahmer. “You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, I suppose,” he said. “It really does make you think about how we’re all one family.”
There are also DNA services such as 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA that invite you to spit into a tube and send it off to a lab. A few weeks later, you’ll get a list of hundreds of people who share enough DNA with you to qualify as cousins. Some of them will likely be second or third cousins; most will be far more distant.
I asked my wife to take a DNA test, and we learned that she and I are cousins. (Distant cousins, thank goodness.) We probably shared an ancestor about 700 years ago. My wife was a little taken aback, but I reminded her that we are in good company, from the Roosevelts to Johann Sebastian Bach to you. Researchers from MIT say the most distant cousin you have on earth is about a 70th cousin.
This project has changed the way I look at the world. It’s reinforced the importance of Rotary’s motto of Service Above Self.
When you see how we’re all related, you feel more responsibility toward your fellow cousins. To give you an admittedly trivial example: I used to think tennis player John McEnroe was an overgrown brat. But when I figured out how I was related to him, my perception shifted. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he’s not so bad after all, I thought. It’s probably mostly shtick.
I’m not deluded. I don’t think world peace will break out. I know all about family feuds – I have three sons, and I see how they wrestle. But I also have witnessed what happens when people encounter the Global Family Tree. It might not cause skinheads to sing “Kumbaya” with Al Sharpton, but I believe it might nudge them toward more tolerance.
And the Global Family Tree isn’t just good for our worldview; it will bring huge scientific benefits. A team at MIT is studying the tree to learn more about how traits and diseases are passed down.
Some people ask, how accurate are these trees? It’s a good question. The answer: They vary. Some branches are well-documented. Others, not so much. But a group of dedicated monitors – they call themselves “forest rangers” – make sure the trees have as few errors as possible.
Former President Bush Sr., Radcliffe, Comedy Central star Nick Kroll, and filmmaker Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me are among several of my more famous cousins who have agreed to help me celebrate the idea that we’re all family in the first Global Family Reunion – the biggest and most inclusive family reunion in history. It will also raise funds for charity: All proceeds will go to two wonderful organizations, the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, based just outside Boston and supported by Rotary clubs, and the Alzheimer’s Association New York City.
Hundreds of volunteers have joined the movement, helping with everything from research to finding food trucks for the party in June. I’m working with WikiTree and Geni, which have both introduced tools so you can figure out your connections. (WikiTree’s is called “100 Degrees of AJ.”)
The volunteers also are helping us raise money for our cause. (Satellite sites can choose their own charity.) I chose Alzheimer’s because my grandfather suffered from it, and I watched this horrible disease devastate my family. And this is a particularly appropriate cause for a project about family history, in part because there is a genetic risk for Alzheimer’s, but also because we learn so much family history from our elders. When they lose their memory, we lose those vital tales. Alzheimer’s is one of the most dire health crises on earth. Forty million members of the human family have this disease. And that number is only going to skyrocket as the population ages.
I hope you’ll join me in overcoming this challenge. You kind of have to. You’re my cousin. — A.J. Jacobs