MEET MY RELATIONS — They're Yours Too!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 301, 29 March 1945, Page 13

MEET MY RELATIONS — They're Yours Too!

Written for "The Listener" by

J. D.

McDONALD

M.A., M.Sc.

VERYONE has two parents and many of us can produce them, while most of the remainder at any rate remember them. Some may even remember their grandparents and there are children alive whowere thoroughly spoiled by their great-grandparents. But unless one lives a century and a-half like Old Parr and becomes a legend, four generations is about the limit of human contact. This represents a span of approximately 120 years. So a man of 70 years to-day may be a son of arrivals on the First Four Ships to Canterbury or the great-grandson of a soldier who fought at Waterloo. He may remember them both, the latter very vaguely of course. Perhaps you, too, belong to an "old family." Why not? We all do. There are people in the U.S.A. who boast of their "Mayflower ancestry" and from their numbers many jealous folk assume that the Mayflower must have been uncomfortably crowded! Then, again, omitting the Japanese Mikado who is directly descended from the Sun god; the kings of Abyssinia who trace their family back to one of Solomon’s little social errors; and the descendants of Confucius who

are aS’ numerous nowadays as "Confucius him say .. ."-apart from such people there are many families in England who can trace themselves back to the Norman Conquest, and French families go back further still, while Chinese family trees just go backwards and backwards; it’s an old Chinese custom. Everyone has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents; so each Mayflower ‘descendant had 2,048 possible ancestors in 1608, of whom he remembers one — "actually stepped ashore on to the Plymouth Rock-no, not the fowl, and certainly not the religion. The one the Mayflower was moored to---." Since then he has had another 2,048 ancestors. At the time of Columbiis each one of us had about a million ancestors and we've had another million since then. Those whose families date from the Conquest had a thousand million possible ancestors at that time of which. they remember one (. . . came over with the Conqueror, my dear... you know what I mean ,. . 1066 and all that..."). Since then there have been

another thousand million possible ancestors. But there were not a thousand million people in the whole world in 1066, Obviously there’s a nigger in the population pile. And here he is. We’re all cousins in some degree or other unless we’re more closely related. Therefore the actual number of our ancestors was not so large as the figures quoted above, because all of us have many of them in common. Of course, nearly all New Zealanders are much more closely related than, say, Americans; and Eskimos and other isolated people are still more tightly linked. An Eskimo family reunion really means something, Most of us, however, are of British stock with occasional Maori blood, yet the Maori himself is a mixture of Polynesian and Melanesian and is related to all the peoples of the Pacific. Besides which, any tangi reveals that any one Maori is related to any other Maori. The Briton, the sturdy despiser of foréigners, certainly has Celtic blood from his original forbears, but it has been rather diluted by the Southern European Romans during their occupation. When ‘the Anglo-Saxons arrived they followed ‘the familiar pattern of killing off the men and marrying the women. After that the Norsemen settled in England and held it for three centuries, so that their northern blood further complicated our racial corpuscles. Finally, we have the Normans. Before they settled in France that country had been the prey of the Asiatic Huns and the African Moors, so when they left their native Norway to found new homes there, the French women with whom they mated were already a very charming mixture of bloods. The results of all this were introduced into the already mixed English stock. Then for centuries after that England was a haven for persecuted Europeans. These left their imprints in the most unlikely places, But where are the Celts, Romans, Normans in England now? The British stock has absorbed them like a sponge soaks up water... but at the price of being diluted itself. The "Master Race" Myth Now where is all this leading? Simply to this: Everyone of British stock is at least a 20th cousin to every other Briton, and people whose families came from isolated localities such as the north of Scotland are probably tenth cousins at the most. (Any "Burns Night" will probably show them to be almost brothers-at any rate towards the end of the evening.) In New Zealand we are yet more: closely related still, On the remoter side, we are all at least 40th cousins to the Asiatics.and rather more remotely connected with the negroes, It

is surely ironical that some of the proud@st families of the Southern U.S.A. are the most closely linked with the said’ negro. , Now, doesn’t this make the myth of a "master race" look even sillier than its sponsors? The Phoenician sailors who traded to Germany before Christ. was born were Semites; the Mohammedans who swept to the gates of Vienna in the 14th century had large forces of Semitic Arabs in their nondescript armies. Both Phoenicians and Arabs certainly got around a little-the Phoenicians especially, for the sailor of every race is notorious for just that. And there is generally some souvenir of his sojourn. Again, when the Semitic Jews were persecuted all over Europe, only Poland and Germany offered them refuge. For ten centuries the Reich has had the largest Jewish population in Europe, and the vivid dark beauty of Jewish women was famous even in the Middle Ages, and then, as now, the Teuton heart was susceptible. Is it possible that the "Herrenvolk" are entirely non-Semitic? On the, contrary, it is probable that not one family in Germany is entirely free from Semitic blood. "Aryan" is merely a word without a meaning. Ancestral "March Past" So we're all mongrels? Who cares?, The mongrel is the intelligent animal. But suppose the thought does worry you, How would you like to take the salute at a "march past" of your ancestors? If they went in threes at 3 m.p.h., at the end of the first hour you’d be back to the one who fought for (or against) Charles I, He' may even have been present at the royal execution and may have lived long enough to see Nell Gwynne selling oranges in the Strand. At the end of the first 24 hours you might see Columbus pass by-or Henry VIIL. Either might be an ancestor. In fact, the only historically important person of the time whom you couldn’t possibly see pass is Queen Elizabeth. In the middle of the second’ week, hoots mon, ‘the skirl of bagpipes announces your forefathers who fought (or ran) at Bannockburn, and a week later you may note the ill-favoured visage of John Lackland, King’ of England. But it will be well past 20 years’ time before you see these ancestors wh you noted with such pride in Doomsday Book. And as the motley throng went by, you would see pass almost every important person who lived up to two centuries ago. It makes one fee] very proud to ponder upon one’s distinguished ancestry, doesn’t it? The pity of it is that one shares it with everyone else, Postscript: You may have noticed a few Chinese, Negroes, Malays, Indians, a Tartar /« or two, and perhaps a fraction of an Eskimo "or Pigmy} who all looked as though they had strayed into the wrong procession by mistake. They hadn’t.