Of course, I want to rail against our delusional president today, but I am going to let it go and see what others are saying….

Instead, I am going to tell you what I learned yesterday as I was wandering through Ancestry.com. As you search for your ancestors, the more generations you go back, the more people you find from whom you are directly descended. You know what I mean – four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 great-great grandparents and on it goes.

Over the past decades, I have put together a family tree, much of which is dependent on two other family trees put together by relatives. I had always thought that I would never be able to go back beyond 1700, where one of the lines on my maternal grandfather’s side traces back to the Baal Shem Tov (and his father, identified from his tombstone). But today I found a public tree on Ancestry.com that goes back well before that on my fathers side.

I am going to abbreviate it for you.

My father Meyer Hessel

His father Abraham Hessel

His mother Gertrude Siegel
Her mother Sona Birnboim

Her mother Feyga Breslav

Her mother Yenta Felshar

Her father Gedalia Felshar

His father Fishel Felshar

His mother Dvora Kuklai

Her father Selig Joffe

His mother Ruchlia Katz

Her father Mordechai Katzenellenbogen

His father Samuel Jehuda Katzenellenbogen

His father Meir Katzenellenbogen

His mother Julia Malka Luria

Her father Yechiel Yehuda

His father Aharon ben Nathaniel Luria

His father Nathaniel ben Yechiel

His father Yechiel Yehuda

His father Reb Shimson of Erfurt

His father Yehiel

His father Soloman

His father Jehiel

His father Solomon

His father Moses Arenetta of Orleans

His father Isaac

His father Eliezer

His father Aaron (the doctor)

His father haGaon Atdam

His father Gaon Yossi of Constantinople

His father Drowsy

His father Yossi bar Nachman of Eretz Israel

His father haGaon Yochanan

His father Yehoshua Zimri

That means that Yehoshua Zimri (and that’s as far as the trees go) was my

great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandfather. And that reaches back at least 1,000 years!

Now I know you have two questions. One is how I can rely on this information, and to that I have no good answer (at this time, at least). Your second question is why anyone would have tried to reach so far back and believe that they have succeeded. That’s an easier one. It’s because Rashi is on this chain and from his time backwards, you can understand why this search has been done.

A couple of other things. How many 32nd great grandparents does one have? I looked that up, and I didn’t find an answer, but Google AI tells me that I have 1,048,576 18th great grand parents.

On this list, my 18th great grandparent would be Rev Shimson of Erfurt, whose life straddled 1400, or about 600 years ago. The world population in 1400 was about 350 million. The Jewish population in 1400 was only about 2,000,000.

If you continue to multiply that 1 million ti the 32nd generation, you wind up with almost 17 billion greatx32 grandparents, of whom dear Yehoshua the Gaon was only one.

There are estimates that several hundred years before, the Jewish population of the world was much larger, maybe as high as 8,000,000. As to how many 32nd great grandparents one has, I am sure it is even more than 8,000,000. This all raises other questions, to be sure. And then how do we get back to that one couple in Africa who were the ancestors of us all?

The other interesting thing about this list is the geographic spread of this chain of my ancestors, or rather not the spread, but the migration. If you had asked me where my father’s father’s family was from, I would have said that they are from northern Lithuania, near the Latvian border. And that would be true as far as my great grandfather and great, great grandfather, but then things are much different. Some of the people on the above list do come from Lithuania or Latvia, but others are in present day Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, Italy, Turkey, France and Israel. Just wandering Jews, I guess, even though sometimes their wandering stops for two or three generations. And, of course, each of the individuals on the list above had a spouse, and it appears that sometime the two spouses were born in the same city, but other times you find spouses who were born hundreds of miles apart. Think of all the stories here.

I hope that at some time, I will find the time to explore all of this further, so that when my grandchildren are given the obvious assignment in elementary or middle school (can you tell use about your 34th level grandparents?), the will answer: “of course”.