We’re All Related

You meet the nicest people in graveyards.

I recently made two posts on my family genealogy, one for my mother’s side of the family, and one on my father’s.  On a trip back to the States last month, I was keenly interested in locating the grave of my-5th great-grandfather Johann Joerg "Hunter George" Miller Sr. (1721-1801) who was from Feldkirchen, Gönnersdorf in the western Rheinland-Pfalz , arrived in Philadelphia on the ship "Aurora" in 1744 with his wife and two of their five eventual children, and settled in Windsor Township. He's reportedly buried in the family plot at St. John's Lutheran in Hamburg, Pennsylvania.

His son (Johann Joerg) George Miller Jr. (1754-1816) was a private in Capt. Nicholas Scheffer's Company, 1st (Col. Gabriel Hiester's) Battalion, 1777 Berks County Militia, and I knew from a Find A Grave listing that he was buried in the same cemetery as his father.

When I arrived back home at my folks’, I called the cemetery director who said she had no record of either of them, which was odd, as I had the photo.  I knew that the primary Miller, Lenhart, and Diener plots are prominently perched around the central circle (my immediate paternal grandparents and most of their ancestors are buried there), but had absolutely no idea where to start for Georges Jr. and Sr.. I figured they might as well give me a lawn mower if I'd have to spend hours methodically trolling through each row anyway. Sigh.

Right as I was about to do so, I saw a man staring at some headstones, clearly looking for something specific, so I decided to ask him if he had a directory. He said no, and that he had just spent hours looking for a specific individual. To make conversation, I asked "for whom are you looking?", and he said "George Miller". I replied "Millers are dime-a-dozen, what was his birth year?", and he said "1754". After a moment of incredulity, I said "well, we're looking for exactly the same headstone". Since I had my German mobile plan roaming data turned off to not completely denude the family fortune, he used his ‘phone to once again pull up the Find A Grave photo, and I could orient myself (street sign and wall visible) and walk the guy to the grave plot in under five minutes.  

So, it turns out his wife and I have the same 4th-great-grandfather (Hunter George Miller's son and Revolutionary War veteran George Jr.) who was born 269 years ago.  We both would've likely never found his grave had we not bumped into each other.  What are the odds?

Well, from my aforementioned recent SubStack piece:  “[B]y 7th-great-grandparents, one is mathematically up to 512 individuals, and by 8th-great-grandparents (roughly 1700-ish), it's 1,024. The logical extension of this would be that each of us today going back 30 generations to the Middle Ages would end up with 2^30 or roughly 1 billion ancestors, more than the total world population at the time, which is impossible. That's where the magic of "pedigree collapse" comes in to keep the numbers reasonable; it’s really just a fancy term for inbreeding. Every person on Earth is max 16th cousins. "The upshot of all this: If you discover that you share a common ancestor with somebody from the 17th century, or even the 18th, it is completely unremarkable. The only thing remarkable about it is that you happened to know the path."  "80% of all marriages in history have been between second cousins or closer".

That all said, had I decided to do my Hamburg day on Friday rather than Thursday, we likely would've never crossed paths, nor found the headstone. I'm convinced that one of the nearby illegible stones is his father Hunter George, and will dissect my high-resolution photos to determine which one it might be.

Life lesson:  One may not believe in fate nor predestination, but always leave plenty of room for amazing coincidence, which in its most pleasant form manifests itself as serendipity.

P.S.  From Webster’s: “Serendipity is a noun, coined in the middle of the 18th century by author Horace Walpole (he took it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip). The adjective form is serendipitous, and the adverb is serendipitously. A serendipitist is "one who finds valuable or agreeable things not sought for."”

In this case it was some random guy who’s going to end up in my ancestry software as “husband of fourth cousin”, which itself is relatively distant in terms of genealogy but highly remarkable nonetheless, as we both now know the path.