Am I Related to Macbeth?

It’s hard to imagine a time before the locomotive, when people like my Dutch farming ancestors lived and commuted within circles no bigger than the marketplace and the parish church.

I have walked in the footsteps (or clogs, if you will) of my Dutch forefathers, but the thing I was looking most forward to about Scotland was following after my mother’s ancestors.

On her side I am related to Clan Mackay, through the lineage of a man named John Bain.

His story is a family tragedy where he suffered such biting betrayal that he dropped the name Mackay altogether. But through his bloodline I can trace my family back to the days of the real Macbeth and the earls of Ross and Moray.

It is dark and foggy in those ancient records, but there is every chance that one of those earls was related to a king ... we may never know.

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It was these deep dives into the annals of my family history that had me stumble across the concept of collapsing pedigree.

As a kid, I was always telling people my great-grandmother's first cousin was iconic cricketer Donald Bradman (true), which no-one believed. Had you have told me then that I was related to Charlemagne, Robbie of 20 years ago would have dropped the cricket bat and grabbed the sword.

The truth is, there is a bit of Charlemagne in all of us (everyone with European descent, that is). It so happens that if you trace your family tree back far enough - as in, you multiply 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, and so on - you inevitably tally up more people than have ever been alive.

The solution to this problem is that somewhere along the line (probably in numerous places) the pedigree collapses less like a tree and more like an hourglass. At various points in time, one person plays multiple roles in the family. Especially in medieval and ancient times (or if you're my Dutch ancestor, in the 20th century) a person might be someone's cousin and spouse, or someone's half-sibling and uncle and spouse. It becomes more complicated the further back you go, but a few simple rules remain: hormones do not change, and as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young said: if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.

This means (to use the European example) that if you go back a mere 1000 years (100th of the lifespan of our species) any person alive then who had children is related to a living European today. This is put nicely by Graham Coop of the University of California:

'It underlines the commonality of all of our histories. You don't have to go back many generations to find that we're all related to each other.'

This branch of genomics proves again how tenuous the forces dividing us are: race, skin colour, birthplace, whether the prequels/tri-quels actually count as Star Wars canon ... we are all truly related irrespective of these. But that doesn't make heritage any less important. In fact, I think it enriches its value.

It makes me want to visit many more places in and around my ancestral lands - Ireland, Scotland, England, Netherlands, Norway - because I am excited by the knowledge that I am related to not only someone from these countries, but everyone from their pasts. Furthermore, it does not extinguish my desire to visit places I have no genetic heritage in: Siberia, Turkey, South America. In this the science just gets better: any person of European or Asian descent has between 1-2% Neanderthal DNA in them. So the extremity of my blood-relation to the dead mass of the human race all depends on the point at which I stop looking - the relation continues whether I look or not.

The further you unwrap the parcel which we pass around, the more you realise each sheet comes from the same newspaper.

Right back to the earliest days. No matter what your outlook or existential understanding is, I for one am thrilled by the prospect that I am the sum of such a long and fascinating tradition and species - I may never know if I am related to the real Macbeth, but somehow it doesn't matter.

* * *

One quick note. I came to a lot of these conclusions about heritage in 2019 when I travelled to my father's birthplace in Southern Netherlands. Until that time, especially in writing my historical fiction, I was always a slave to the facts; if I could not find the precise place or the precise record of some event, I was despondent. I wanted accuracy. I wanted historical perfection.

But in Holland I learned that the government puts grave-sites on 20-or-so year leases, and afterwards, if the family does not pay renewal, they toss the old bones out and turn the soil over. I had a similarly frustrating experience in northern England when searching for my mother's ancestors: after walking through cemetery after cemetery after cemetery, I could not find a single person I was related to. Then something dawned on me, and I wrote it down in a notebook:

Heritage can be a case of personal favourites. After no more than eight generations we are related to over 250 individuals. This means that your surname is a red herring - following one lineage exclusively (be it your father's or your mother's) is not the point. We are 25% of every one of our grandparents and an eighth of every one of their parents. I once thanked my parents at a book launch by saying: In all things we realise we are ultimately the sum of two parts ... It goes like that (and helps a lot in understanding why you lose your temper or why your marriage failed - the vowel between nature and nurture is quite moot).

Therefore, we should be more concerned with the place and community of our ancestry over and above the individual - look not at the headstone that fades and crumbles in two centuries. Look at the graveyard around it. All those buried there were at one time your flesh and blood. They are not strangers, regardless of their inherited names.

Having seen all that I have seen, I feel some sense of closure. I can carry on with my life. I am no longer upset if I cannot find the headstones. I may be able to trace one line of my family back to the eleventh century, but that single path is a distraction from all the other paths, which, taking a detour past Rome, lead directly back to us.

Chasing headstones. St Cuthbert's Church, Carham, Northumberland (August 2019).