28 ms·

I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s Violent Secret

40 points by dsr12 12y ago

bdcravens 12y ago
There are probably a large number of the 6 billion alive that were the result of rape in their lineage, even within the past 8-10 generations. I think we want to have a connection to those in our past, but the reality is that we have more in common with any random name on the census than those whose DNA eventually trickled down to us.
- sdrothrock 12y ago
  > the reality is that we have more in common with any random name on the census than those whose DNA eventually trickled down to us. Really? DNA will give you a whole lot of things. What if the theoretical rapist had a predisposition to Alzheimer's? MS? Parkinson's? Huntingdon's? etc.
  - waterhouse 12y ago
    Well, actually, after 8 generations, each allele has 8 chances to not get inherited. So if the rapist had, say, one copy of the Huntington's allele (an autosomal dominant mutation according to Wiki), then you would have a 1/256 chance of having inherited the disease from that ancestor. Two copies of the allele from the rapist would give you a 1/128 chance. I'd have to say GP's point stands here.
- tomkwok 12y ago
  > There are probably a large number of the 6 billion alive that were the result of rape in their lineage, even within the past 8-10 generations. Didn't the world population exceed 7 billion some years ago? And I just googled and found a recent Reddit thread of which the OP had a similar thought to yours. Interesting. http://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/2i25ol/do_i_exist_only_because_one_of_my_ancestors_was/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/2i25ol/do_i_...
- MaysonL 12y ago
  My mother had black hair, even though she was of pure Swedish ancestry (both of her parents immigrated from Sweden). She said that it was a family legend that the black hair was inherited from French women brought back by Viking ancestors.
  - peterfirefly 12y ago
    More likely it came from Finns.
azinman2 12y ago
So it's interesting and all, but why is this in HN?
- blazar 12y ago
  The role of technology in family? The fact that two hundred years from now, your descendants might google you and see this post? It's a bit bewildering.
  - erlo 12y ago
    Almost all subject matter will have a technology aspect to it, does that immediately qualify it as HN worthy?
- karlshea 12y ago
  Why am I seeing so many of these comments lately? It's on HN because it was voted to the front page. Not every thread has to be about a VC, startup, or argument about a database engine.
  - xtrumanx 12y ago
    > Why am I seeing so many of these comments lately? I'm pretty sure I read before that PG started HN back before reddit had subreddits because he wanted a community about a specific set of topics. Lots of people then formed an idea of what HN was about and started visiting regularly for more of the same. If something seems out of place and on the front page it's perfectly natural to expect comments questioning why something got upvoted.
    - karlshea 12y ago
      This is the very first paragraph of the Guidelines: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. I've seen lots of non-technology topics since I started reading, and to me this post didn't seem out of place at all. The "why is this here" posts seem to be happening more frequently in the last couple of months, but I guess it's possible that I just wasn't noticing them before.
Demiurge 12y ago
The notion that "blood carries" anything other than oxygen and nutrients seem archaic, intellectually offensive and as dangerous as racism.
- tim333 12y ago
  Carries some DNA too.
  - Demiurge 12y ago
    Oh, good point. Lets judge people by their DNA now.
    - valvar 12y ago
      No, let's just pretend that heritability doesn't exist, the world is much more comfortable that way.
      - Demiurge 12y ago
        I'm not the biggest Hollywood fan, but what do you think about movies like Gattaca, Minority Report? We aren't even anywhere close to such fictional understanding of the role of DNA and nature-vs-nurture mechanics of human development, or even what sentience is. And you think we can use DNA to judge people? I never said "lets pretend heritability doesn't exit", I implied we can't judge people based on whatever you think we do know about it.
      - Retra 12y ago
        The only thing you should evaluate people on is their ability to make decisions, and if that correlates with genetics, you need to be willing and able to modify genetics to make that fact relevant.
  - jeorgun 12y ago
    To be completely pedantic, red blood cells lack nuclei, so aside from maybe mitochondria or something they actually don't carry DNA.
stretchwithme 12y ago
We all descended from rapists, killers, child molesters and slave owners, if you go back far enough.
- tomkwok 12y ago
  There was inevitable inbreeding between ancestors too.
  - bitserf 12y ago
    Did the DNA test through 23andme.com, some interesting East Asian and African skeletons were discovered for a family supposedly of purely European lineage :)
    - bdowling 12y ago
      I don't think you should read too much into a statistical matching of your DNA markers with statistical samplings of populations in which individual samples also vary widely. It's the modern version of those occupational survey systems (Kuder?) that really just tell you what population your answers are most similar to, with very little useful insight.
  - jacobolus 12y ago
    The way you phrased that shows some bias toward contemporary European family structures. Inbreeding was standard accepted practice pretty much everywhere until 1500 years ago, and still is in many parts of the world. (In many Arab countries, for example, marriages between first cousins make up 15+% of all marriages, and marriages between first or second cousins make up 30+% of all marriages.) It’s especially in Western Europe where cousin marriages out to 2nd, 3rd, or further cousins were taboo, and universal “outbreeding” was/is the enforced norm. (Primarily because the Catholic church wanted to break the political power of extended families, and divert more inheritances to the church instead of to people’s kin. In similar vein they discouraged/disallowed divorce, adoptions, marriage of widows, etc.) I did a google search to look for quick sources just now. This page has a summary: http://www.collective-action.info/_DEB_MAP_RelationMarriagePatternsExchangeInheritance http://www.collective-action.info/_DEB_MAP_RelationMarriageP...
tim333 12y ago
I guess there will be more and more of that as paper archives are scanned and indexed. I find the family history interesting but have had to use non google methods of research.
xasos 12y ago
It's a common thing to say that we Australians are descendants of criminals (Australia was originally populated by British prisoners). It's interesting to see that it is now one of the friendliest countries in the world, coming from a country filled with criminals 200 years ago. In the end, we have all descended from a criminal in one form or the other :)
- nailer 12y ago
  We shouldn't let them get away with it though: it's still as ignorant of history as saying Americans are descended from puritans. There was no Melbourne (4.5M people) prison - John Batman sailed up a river, decided 'it was a good place for a city'. There's been waves of farmers, waves of gold miners, waves of British and mediterranean emigrees and waves of refugees.
vinceyuan 12y ago
As a non-native English speaker, I couldn't understand the title until I realized his great-grandfather Michael Zarbatany is his mother's grandfather, instead of his father's grandfather. Why doesn't English distinguish between paternal grandparents and maternal grandparents?
- tomkwok 12y ago
  You just demonstrated how to. "Why aren't there words instead of phrases for paternal grandparents and maternal grandparents?" is what you mean, right?
- anton-107 12y ago
  Is it really important to distinguish?
  - DominikD 12y ago
    It's a cultural thing I guess. I know some people who think of their maternal lineage as if it were less of a family than the paternal one. Their excuse borders religion and superstitions. I'm interested though which languages distinguish maternal and paternal grandparents. Just like in English, in Polish you simply qualify[1] if things like these matter. [1] paternal: po mieczu (sword lineage); maternal: po kądzieli (distaff lineage)
nchelluri 12y ago
Leave it to a vice.com article to reference how relevant material is avoided (twice) because of the cost for a paywall. If the guy really wanted to find out what was going on, he'd at least pay the $20 to find out.
- johnchristopher 12y ago
  Christine Estima is the author.
  - nchelluri 12y ago
    Poor reading comprehension on my part.
johnchristopher 12y ago
> I sit here, armed with this knowledge, and I think to myself quite shamefully, You can take the man out of Syria but you can't take Syria out of the man. The author can be damn shamed about that reasoning. I hope she only take it for granted for herself and not every Syrian on earth. > I suppose, when you come from a family that is named after a gun, you will, in all likelihood, die by that gun. Well, no. I seem to recall from reading the article 5 minutes ago that her great-grandfather was actually a nice guy.

40 points by dsr12 12y ago

There are probably a large number of the 6 billion alive that were the result of rape in their lineage, even within the past 8-10 generations. I think we want to have a connection to those in our past, but the reality is that we have more in common with any random name on the census than those whose DNA eventually trickled down to us.

sdrothrock 12y ago
> the reality is that we have more in common with any random name on the census than those whose DNA eventually trickled down to us. Really? DNA will give you a whole lot of things. What if the theoretical rapist had a predisposition to Alzheimer's? MS? Parkinson's? Huntingdon's? etc.
- waterhouse 12y ago
  Well, actually, after 8 generations, each allele has 8 chances to not get inherited. So if the rapist had, say, one copy of the Huntington's allele (an autosomal dominant mutation according to Wiki), then you would have a 1/256 chance of having inherited the disease from that ancestor. Two copies of the allele from the rapist would give you a 1/128 chance. I'd have to say GP's point stands here.
tomkwok 12y ago
> There are probably a large number of the 6 billion alive that were the result of rape in their lineage, even within the past 8-10 generations. Didn't the world population exceed 7 billion some years ago? And I just googled and found a recent Reddit thread of which the OP had a similar thought to yours. Interesting. http://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/2i25ol/do_i_exist_only_because_one_of_my_ancestors_was/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/2i25ol/do_i_...
MaysonL 12y ago
My mother had black hair, even though she was of pure Swedish ancestry (both of her parents immigrated from Sweden). She said that it was a family legend that the black hair was inherited from French women brought back by Viking ancestors.
- peterfirefly 12y ago
  More likely it came from Finns.

azinman2 12y ago

So it's interesting and all, but why is this in HN?

blazar 12y ago
The role of technology in family? The fact that two hundred years from now, your descendants might google you and see this post? It's a bit bewildering.
- erlo 12y ago
  Almost all subject matter will have a technology aspect to it, does that immediately qualify it as HN worthy?
karlshea 12y ago
Why am I seeing so many of these comments lately? It's on HN because it was voted to the front page. Not every thread has to be about a VC, startup, or argument about a database engine.
- xtrumanx 12y ago
  > Why am I seeing so many of these comments lately? I'm pretty sure I read before that PG started HN back before reddit had subreddits because he wanted a community about a specific set of topics. Lots of people then formed an idea of what HN was about and started visiting regularly for more of the same. If something seems out of place and on the front page it's perfectly natural to expect comments questioning why something got upvoted.
  - karlshea 12y ago
    This is the very first paragraph of the Guidelines: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. I've seen lots of non-technology topics since I started reading, and to me this post didn't seem out of place at all. The "why is this here" posts seem to be happening more frequently in the last couple of months, but I guess it's possible that I just wasn't noticing them before.

Demiurge 12y ago

The notion that "blood carries" anything other than oxygen and nutrients seem archaic, intellectually offensive and as dangerous as racism.

tim333 12y ago
Carries some DNA too.
- Demiurge 12y ago
  Oh, good point. Lets judge people by their DNA now.
  - valvar 12y ago
    No, let's just pretend that heritability doesn't exist, the world is much more comfortable that way.
    - Demiurge 12y ago
      I'm not the biggest Hollywood fan, but what do you think about movies like Gattaca, Minority Report? We aren't even anywhere close to such fictional understanding of the role of DNA and nature-vs-nurture mechanics of human development, or even what sentience is. And you think we can use DNA to judge people? I never said "lets pretend heritability doesn't exit", I implied we can't judge people based on whatever you think we do know about it.
    - Retra 12y ago
      The only thing you should evaluate people on is their ability to make decisions, and if that correlates with genetics, you need to be willing and able to modify genetics to make that fact relevant.
- jeorgun 12y ago
  To be completely pedantic, red blood cells lack nuclei, so aside from maybe mitochondria or something they actually don't carry DNA.

stretchwithme 12y ago

We all descended from rapists, killers, child molesters and slave owners, if you go back far enough.

tomkwok 12y ago
There was inevitable inbreeding between ancestors too.
- bitserf 12y ago
  Did the DNA test through 23andme.com, some interesting East Asian and African skeletons were discovered for a family supposedly of purely European lineage :)
  - bdowling 12y ago
    I don't think you should read too much into a statistical matching of your DNA markers with statistical samplings of populations in which individual samples also vary widely. It's the modern version of those occupational survey systems (Kuder?) that really just tell you what population your answers are most similar to, with very little useful insight.
- jacobolus 12y ago
  The way you phrased that shows some bias toward contemporary European family structures. Inbreeding was standard accepted practice pretty much everywhere until 1500 years ago, and still is in many parts of the world. (In many Arab countries, for example, marriages between first cousins make up 15+% of all marriages, and marriages between first or second cousins make up 30+% of all marriages.) It’s especially in Western Europe where cousin marriages out to 2nd, 3rd, or further cousins were taboo, and universal “outbreeding” was/is the enforced norm. (Primarily because the Catholic church wanted to break the political power of extended families, and divert more inheritances to the church instead of to people’s kin. In similar vein they discouraged/disallowed divorce, adoptions, marriage of widows, etc.) I did a google search to look for quick sources just now. This page has a summary: http://www.collective-action.info/_DEB_MAP_RelationMarriagePatternsExchangeInheritance http://www.collective-action.info/_DEB_MAP_RelationMarriageP...

tim333 12y ago

I guess there will be more and more of that as paper archives are scanned and indexed. I find the family history interesting but have had to use non google methods of research.

xasos 12y ago

It's a common thing to say that we Australians are descendants of criminals (Australia was originally populated by British prisoners). It's interesting to see that it is now one of the friendliest countries in the world, coming from a country filled with criminals 200 years ago. In the end, we have all descended from a criminal in one form or the other :)

nailer 12y ago
We shouldn't let them get away with it though: it's still as ignorant of history as saying Americans are descended from puritans. There was no Melbourne (4.5M people) prison - John Batman sailed up a river, decided 'it was a good place for a city'. There's been waves of farmers, waves of gold miners, waves of British and mediterranean emigrees and waves of refugees.

vinceyuan 12y ago

As a non-native English speaker, I couldn't understand the title until I realized his great-grandfather Michael Zarbatany is his mother's grandfather, instead of his father's grandfather. Why doesn't English distinguish between paternal grandparents and maternal grandparents?

tomkwok 12y ago
You just demonstrated how to. "Why aren't there words instead of phrases for paternal grandparents and maternal grandparents?" is what you mean, right?
anton-107 12y ago
Is it really important to distinguish?
- DominikD 12y ago
  It's a cultural thing I guess. I know some people who think of their maternal lineage as if it were less of a family than the paternal one. Their excuse borders religion and superstitions. I'm interested though which languages distinguish maternal and paternal grandparents. Just like in English, in Polish you simply qualify[1] if things like these matter. [1] paternal: po mieczu (sword lineage); maternal: po kądzieli (distaff lineage)

nchelluri 12y ago

Leave it to a vice.com article to reference how relevant material is avoided (twice) because of the cost for a paywall. If the guy really wanted to find out what was going on, he'd at least pay the $20 to find out.

johnchristopher 12y ago
Christine Estima is the author.
- nchelluri 12y ago
  Poor reading comprehension on my part.

johnchristopher 12y ago

> I sit here, armed with this knowledge, and I think to myself quite shamefully, You can take the man out of Syria but you can't take Syria out of the man. The author can be damn shamed about that reasoning. I hope she only take it for granted for herself and not every Syrian on earth. > I suppose, when you come from a family that is named after a gun, you will, in all likelihood, die by that gun. Well, no. I seem to recall from reading the article 5 minutes ago that her great-grandfather was actually a nice guy.