The Storyteller's Dilemna

With dazzling simplicity, Genesis gets right to the starting point: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Somewhat less ambitious, from the Brothers Grimm among others, comes the equally trouble-free starter: "Once upon a time ...." And then we have the model for all genealogists in the Gospel of Matthew: "The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham." In like manner, this goes on for 48 generations, from Abraham to David (14), from David to the deportation to Babylon (14) and from the deportation from Babylon to Christ (14), nicely symmetrical and more soporific than counting sheep. If, for some reason, that does not cure your insomnia, go back to Genesis 5:1-32 and work on the lineage from Adam to Noah.

It seems to me that you can tell a story this way if and only if one or more of the following conditions are met: (1) you have all the relevant facts before you start writing; (2) you are making it up as you go along; (3) you do not care if anyone reads it. Genealogy, like a crime scene investigation, works backwards in time. It starts with clues from the present and then uses those clues to reconstruct the past. So, like any good detective novel, there are really two stories -- one a whodunit and the other a howdunit.

So I plan to tell this story by ratcheting back from the present one generation at a time, sort of like winding up a music box and letting it play part of the tune, then stopping it and resetting to play the next preceeding part. But this strategy doesn't solve all problems. The biblical genealogies are, for the most part, lineal descents through the father's line. The approach here goes back through ancestors on both the maternal and paternal lines, like a fan. That means the number of direct ancestors doubles with each generation -- 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2028. Of course, this is less of a problem than trying to account for all descendants if I were to start with the earliest documented ancestor from 10 generations ago when the average number of surviving children who also had children was about five per generation -- 5, 25, 125, 575, 2875, 14375, 71875, 359375, 1796875, 8984375.

Fortunately, in more recent generations, later marriages and birth control may have saved future geneaologists the fate of Tristram Shandy, the fictional character who attempted to write his autobiography in real time and fell hopelessly behind because he could not write as fast as he lived.