What is the most distant connection you have found? (Most degrees)?

Question

Recently I saw that I was 51 degrees from one of the featured profiles. That's the most I have seen. Anyone seen a more distant connection?

Answer 1

61 degrees from the inventor of the ice cream scoop, Alfred Cralle.

Answer 2

When they featured St Patrick recently, was a very long connection. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Ap_Calpurnius-1 He doesn't appear to have had known children, so he connects through a sister. 49degrees for me, to a direct cousin. This week I am 59degrees from Alfred Cralle.

Comments

St. Patrick died in AD 461; the connection distance is probably equivalent to the number of generations (also it's almost certainly incorrect; there is no reliable genealogy linking any person from the Middle Ages to a known ancestor in the ancient world, ie pre-AD 476 and the fall of Rome).

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Even if the tree was accurate, how often does someone give birth to another persons child, other than the husband.

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The connections are non-bloodline (through marriages and in-law relationships); and the answer to that is "it depends" (since the rate of misattributed paternity varies by culture; for Northern Europe it's been found to be on average 1-2% per generation, based on Y-DNA analysis of rare surnames).

Answer 3

53 degrees from Alfred Cralle (which likely has more to do with the difficulties of genealogy for African-Americans prior to the Civil War and emancipation than the connection actually being that distant).

Comments

I think that most of these great distances are caused by the sparseness of our known tree. I'm guessing that if our tree was "complete", or nearly so, everyone alive today would be within, say, 20 degrees of everyone born in the last couple hundred years. (Or, maybe only 6 degrees if you are talking about Kevin Bacon. :)

Answer 4

I am 98 degrees from (dateless) Faiz Ul Hasan (Khanum) Hamdani  through his daughter, born in the 1930s. He himself is 126 degrees from Alfred Cralle.

As you can see in the related questions, I have been interested in this for some time.

There is more (than you wanted to know) about the most distant profiles on this space page about the "outer rim". - and here is a bit about the metrics of Mary, queen of Scots.

Comments

Boy, [[Khanum-8|Faiz Ul Hasan (Khanum) Hamdani]] is far out there!  I am 101 degrees from him.  I hadn't encountered such large degrees of separation before.  Thanks for pointing this out.

Answer 5

I was over 60 degrees away of Ludwig van Beethoven when he was just connected, that shortened in the meanwhile to 45. I also was over 50 degrees of one of our Swedish users when she was member of the week, now it's "only" 47.

When I joined most of my connections were in the high 30, low 40 degrees. In the meanwhile low 30 is kind of usual.

Edit: One of the outer-rim profiles, Joseph Held, is 86 degrees away from me.

Comments

@Jelena, I missed this post somehow for two months, sorry for the late answer, just a kind reminder ... I sent you a couple of messages about it w/o feedback ...

You are the PM of one of the current furthest (so-called Outer Rim) branches with e.g., Johanne Elisabeth Henriette (Seyfert) Töllner, currently at 163 degrees from the above mentioned Faiz Ul Hasan (Khanum) Hamdani.

My path to Johanne profile goes through Carl Philipp Kunhardt, of whom you are also the PM, as well as, if I don't miss anything the 67 steps between Johanne and Carl.

So ... maybe time to launch a challenge to pull back this far-flung branch towards the center, there are certainly shortcuts to be found.