An important effect of the progression of family history is that, in a sense, with each new generation one's number of ancestors doubles, yet at the same time the connection to those ancestor's diminishes. For example, one particularly admirable individual, Nicolaus Kranz (b. 1797) is six generations removed from the author, equating to a 1/32nd connection. Couple this with the fact that our ancestors procreated rather excessively (10 to 14 children is not uncommon), and this has the practical effect that some hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of living individuals today share that 1/32nd link. This results in a wonderful ancillary benefit: when one goes back far enough, you begin to join a rather legion group of genealogy researchers (which, in the glamorous field of genealogy, means you join one or two other researchers! :).  The image above demonstrates that genealogical data beyond the 16th generation is rather tenuous, since the odds are that not a single gene will carry down. Further, keep in mind that the 16th generation is so far distant (approximately 480 years past) that the viewer has 65,536 ancestors if we assume no pedigree collapse. Note that there are two exceptions to this rule: (1) Mitochondrial DNA, passed down through one's maternal lineage; (2) Y-Chromosome gene, passed down through the paternal lineage of males. Hence, this places particular value on long term genealogical data for data on one's purely maternal and paternal lines.
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