What My Kids Are Learning From Their 240 Million Relatives
AJ Jacobs, Julie Jacobs, and their children: Lucas, 8 (left), Jasper 11, (middle), and Zane, 8 (right). (Photo: AJ Jacobs)
I’ve always wanted a big family. But I never imagined that I’d have one with 240 million people in it.
That’s right — there’s almost a quarter of a billion human beings related to me by blood or marriage. President Barack Obama and Lady Gaga are included. You could be, too.
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I started piecing together my mega-monster family tree (which is really more like a thick, tangled, and sprawling rainforest) about two years ago, when I got an email from a man who had read one of my books. He said, “You don’t know me, but I’m your 12th cousin.”
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Naturally, I figured he was going to try to sell me a patch of swamp in central Florida or some herbal energy boosters. But it turns out he’s part of a team of researchers and scientists who are revolutionizing family history.
We have entered the era of the mega-family tree for two reasons: First, DNA testing can provide you a list of hundreds of people who share enough DNA to be considered cousins. Second, massive online collaborative family trees. Think Wikipedia, but for ancestry. Thousands of people in more than 100 countries are collaborating on the same tree, and merging smaller trees into one world tree.
The lines aren’t always direct. In fact, they’re often comically long and through marriage, a genealogical version of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. But they are real. For instance, Barack Obama is my aunt’s fifth great aunt’s husband’s brother’s seventh great nephew.
I love the idea of a World Family Tree, and I’m making it the topic of my next book.
The idea of a mega-monster family tree has shifted my perspective on family. It’s also changed my kids, nudging them to be a bit more compassionate. (Though they remain annoyed they don’t get 240 million birthday presents.)
The tree is also an amazing tool for getting them interested in history. Consider Albert Einstein. I’ve been able to find a link to him — distant, but still. I told my sons and now Einstein isn’t some old dead white guy with weird hair. He’s Uncle Albert! They want to know what he said. It makes the abstract personal.
It’s a remarkably effective way to teach tolerance. My sons now know they have distant relatives in 160 countries. They know they have cousins of every hue imaginable.
We have placemats with a map of the world on them. At breakfast, my 8 year old will point to a country — Thailand, for example — and ask “Are we cousins with everyone here?”
Yes, we are, I’ll tell him. We share 99.9 percent of our DNA with all other humans. We come from the same two ancestors — scientists call them mitochondrial Eve and Y Chromosomal Adam, and they lived about 150,000 years ago.
My son jokingly asked about Spongebob the other day. Is he our cousin? Well, sponges do share 70 percent of human DNA. So sure, why not?
To celebrate this notion of One Big Family, I’m throwing a big party. It’s called the Global Family Reunion, and you’re invited, along with everyone else on earth. It’s a first-ever, day-long festival in New York taking place on June 6 on the grounds of the world’s fair at the New York Hall of Science. (Discounted tickets for Yahoo readers can be purchased here.)
We’ll have a team of genealogists who will try to connect you to the tree on site, so your kids can see how they’re connected to Nelson Mandela, Taylor Swift and everyone in between.
We’ll have more than 400 activities, from potato sack races to face painting. And more than 50 entertainers from Henry Louis Gates to magician David Blaine to Sister Sledge, who will, of course, be singing the ultimate family anthem, “We Are Family.“
Oh, and we’ll break world records aplenty.
So please come. You’ll have a blast. Plus you have to. You’re my cousin.
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