Asturian-American Migration Forum

According to an article on the internet, our number of grandparents doubles with each generation. They say that if one counts back 10 generations it would equal 2,046 ancestors. The article indicates that one could have millions of cousins. The article states that one typically shares 12.5 percent of one's first cousin's DNA and with second cousins one shares only 3.125 percent of the second cousin's DNA. I have yet to comprehend the science of counting cousins and how they are related and how many times they are removed. ( ancestors are parents, grandparents and great grandparents).
(cousins and all others would be relatives).

If it is true, that one could exponentially could have a million cousins given the number of ancestors, it is my guess that we the descendants having Asturian heritage are very likely to be related to each other.

In doing research on my spouse's paternal side of the family, I have found 12 cousins that she is related to dating back to the early 1800's. On her maternal side of the family, there is a genealogical journal delineating the family relationships with a least a thousand or more cousins.

In closing, we all may be related.

It's true. I don't even know most of the children and grandchildren of my great aunts and uncles. just two generations back. And I've got at least one first cousin I've never met.

Part of this may be due to the immigrant experience. The experience of traveling to the US and never being able to visit with relatives in the homeland may have been normalized cutoffs in many relationships.

It often struck me that immigrants may have distrusted those who they didn't intimately know. There was also, for some, a realistic fear that the extended family would expect financial assistance.

The reasons may have differed with each family. At least in my family, there was a tendency to lose contact with family back in Asturias, and somewhat here in the US, too.

Yes, Theoretically the number of our ancestors does increases as powers of 2 as we go back in time. We have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen great great grandparents, etc. In the real world, however, several factors tend to reduce our number of ancestors.

First, for most of human history, long distance migration over one or a few generations has been uncommon. Each new generation tended to remain close to the preceding one, with the result that relatives tended to live in relative close proximity to one another. After several generations, mating between fairly close cousins occurred unbeknownst to the people involved. In some culture, cousin marriage were not uncommon. This means that some of the ancestors among the different lines of descent leading to an individual were related; most human populations have hidden inbreeding as well as - in some instances - known cousin matings.

Second, the geometric increase in ancestors as we go back it time become impossible when we consider current and past population sizes. From the battle of Covadonga till today about fourteen centuries have passed. Assuming a generation time of 33 years, fourteen centuries is about 40 generations have elapsed. Two raised to the power of 40, a geometrici increase would mean one person today had 1,099,511,627,776 ancestors. That'is well over one trillion ninety nine billion people, a number far bigger than the current human population size, carrying capacity of the earth, and the total number of all members of our species who ever lived.

The reality is that humanity is inbred and has experienced a great deal of differential reproduction, genetic drift and other such factors. We all descended from a tiny original human population.

Thanks, Bob!

So, 2 raised to the power of 40 would be the number of great great ... grandparents we had at the time of Covadonga about 40 generations ago? Wow, that's pretty impressive. It's so ridiculously huge.

I wonder if there are any estimates of the population of Asturias in that period?

Some years ago, I saw a TV program that stated that some 75,000 years ago the human population dwindled to only about 3000 people. Scientists were not sure why this came about. They mentioned the possibility of some cataclysmic catastrophe that happened on earth. Supposedly, the lack of tree ring growth during that period in time backed up their belief. Further, their mitochondrial DNA studies supported this idea about the human race almost going extinct.

If a world wide disaster happened, it could mean that our ancestors would have had very little chance of being paired with someone outside of a family group. Thus, this might account for cousins eventually marrying each other.

I haven't been able to find a good estimate 0f the population size of Asturias at the beginning f the reconquista, but t must have been quite small, certainly less than the 100,000 estimate for the 16th century. Also, the modern borders of Asturias are not the same as those of the early 8th Century, the Moors had entered the area, and during the preceding centuries invading tribe such as the Visigoths and the Suevi entered northern Spain. All such populations are likely to have brought in new strains of disease to which the early Asturians had little immunity. Warfare and crop failures undoubtedly limited population size.
Plague, cholera and other such diseases were not unknown in the the world even earlier than the time period in questions, based on examinations of surviving textual material by scholars. Although the name Avilés may derive from that of a Roman, there are no dated records of the city until the Middle Ages.

I don't think I can give an accurate estimate. I do know that this "Pedigree collapse" thing exists, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedigree_collapse meaning you definitely don't have as many ancestors as if they were all unrelated. Asturian population in the 8th - 9th centuries had to be very small, even less than 100.000 seems reasonable. Those were the "dark centuries", right after the Plague of Justinian (541 AD) and all of Europe was going through a demographic crisis. Also, bear in mind that, prior to the arrival of potatoes and the improvement in plough and rotation of crops, the land simply couldn't sustain as many people as it would eventually be able to

My personal guess would be far less than 100,000. All three major cities, Oviedo, Gijón and Avilés, were tiny in Pelayo's time. Although the name is drives from the Latin place name Ovetum, there is little mention of it as a town until the Middle Ages. Gijón, where there is archeological evidence of Roman occupation, appears in written records primarily since 1230 CE, consistent with the idea that it remained small. It was all but destroyed i the 14th century.and has grown to its present size relatively recently. Avilés had settlement dating from the paleolithic, and except for the churches established by Alfonso III in the early tenth centuries, appears in the records as a town primarily from the Middle Ages. These major cities were very small, as were most other settlements. My personal guess - and it is a guess - is 30,000 to 50,000.

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reino_de_ ... e_Asturias

Based on the results of carbon 14 testing carried out on wood and other material found in the fortified Roman camp with moats and trenches 2 meters deep, with watchtowers and palisades, which is being dug up for years now the fort was made at the end of the 7th Century and was used until first part of the 8th Century. They were to protect the trade route of La Carisa (a mountain pass between county Aller and county Lena) leading to León and on to the rest of the Iberian peninsula . Taking into consideration that people needed food, clothing and water, they not only protected the route down to the coast (Pravia, Aviles, Gijón - with diffferent names in those days) they were a source of commercial trade themselves.


Some people think we did not have enough food to support a large population. We had no potatoes, but we were absolute masters of animal husbandry, we but had turnips and chestnuts, that were dried and ground to make flour. We had spelt, but no corn, other than that we had pastures for livestock, we kept pigs and chicken, there was game, trouts and salmon in the rivers, and so I believe a 100.000 Asturians from different tribes could very welll survive and not be hungry or undernourished.
The population soared after the American potato and corn did so well in our gardens, though.

https://www.lne.es/cuencas/2011/10/23/c ... 46470.html

The wikipedia page Mouguias pointed to has these thoughts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedigree_ ... Q7qS7rpgdI

In genealogy, pedigree collapse describes how reproduction between two individuals who share an ancestor causes the number of distinct ancestors in the family tree of their offspring to be smaller than it could otherwise be. ....

Without pedigree collapse, a person's ancestor tree is a binary tree, formed by the person, the parents (2), the grandparents (4), great-grandparents (8), and so on. However, the number of individuals in such a tree grows exponentially and will eventually become impossibly high. For example, a single individual alive today would, over 30 generations going back to the High Middle Ages, have {\displaystyle 2^{30}} 2^{{30}} or roughly a billion ancestors, more than the total world population at the time.[2]

This paradox is explained by shared ancestors, referred to as pedigree collapse. Instead of consisting of all different individuals, a tree may have multiple places occupied by a single individual. This typically happens when the parents of an ancestor are related to each other (sometimes unbeknownst to themselves).[3][4] For example, the offspring of two first cousins has at most only six great-grandparents instead of the normal eight. This reduction in the number of ancestors is pedigree collapse. It collapses the ancestor tree into a directed acyclic graph.

In some cultures, cousins and other relations were permitted, encouraged, or required to marry. This may have been to keep kin bonds, wealth and property within a family (endogamy) or simply because there was a limited number of potential marriage partners available. Among royalty, the frequent requirement to only marry other royals resulted in a reduced gene pool in which most individuals were the result of extensive pedigree collapse. Alfonso XII of Spain, for example, had only four great-grandparents instead of the usual eight. Furthermore, two of these great-grandparents, Charles IV of Spain and Maria Luisa of Parma, who were first cousins, were parents of another twice great-grandmother, Maria Isabella of Spain. Charles IV was also the brother of another twice great-grandparent, Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies; they were both sons of Charles III of Spain and Maria Amalia of Saxony.

More generally, in many cultures intermarriage may frequently occur within a small village, limiting the available gene pool. ....

Small, isolated populations such as those of remote islands represent extreme examples of pedigree collapse, but the common historical tendency to marry those within walking distance, due to the relative immobility of the population before modern transport, meant that most marriage partners were at least distantly related. Even in America around the 19th century, the tendency of immigrants to marry among their ethnic, language or cultural group produced many cousin marriages.

If one considers as a function of time t the number of a given individual's ancestors who were alive at time t, it is likely that for most individuals this function has a maximum at around 1200 AD. Some geneticists[which?] believe that everyone on Earth is at most 50th cousin to everyone else.[5]

This thread reminds me of the old days. Those were wonderful times. I love you guys!!

Intermarriage of cousins may lead to genetic changes where individuals pass down diseases and medical conditions to future generations. In 1999, I was shocked to learn that I have a blood clotting condition which I was told was hereditary after genetic testing. The doctor told me that this condition could skip over generations; although, my siblings, nieces and nephews do not have this problem nor does our son. Our grandson has yet to be tested. One or both parents could have passed it down to me. I guess that I will never know, nor do I care.

I do know of three situations where cousins married cousins. One family I know did so to keep their family surname attached to their estate because they did not have a male heir.

Sobre la estimación de la población de Asturias en la época de la batalla de Covadonga e incluso antes, cuando los romanos, existe una obre de varios autores y expertos sobre las fortificaciones defensivas que existen en las dos vias romanas de entrad en Asturias En la calzada romana que va desde Astorga al centro de la región, a Llanera, en el paso por el concejo de Somiedo, el la calzada romana conocida como La Mesa, existe un trabajo consistente en muro, foso y muralla en un lugar estratégico por lo estrecho favorable a defender la entrada de ejércitos por esa vía romana.
En la otra via romana de acceso a la region, la via romana de La Carisa, entre el concejo de Lena y el concejo de Aller, se descubrió los restos de un campamento romano y los restos de una fortificación astur. Aunque existen muchas incógnitas sobre su datación o sobre su época de utilización, sí se sabe que las vías fueron hechas por los romanos y que Pelayo persiguió a los moros por ellas.
Entre los expertos que publican el libro y el estudio, se encuentran arqueólogos, historiadores y, lo que a mi me llamó mas la atención, un experto militar del cuerpo de zapadores, el cuerpo militar encargado de infraestructura.
Este experto concluyó dos cosas. Una que para hacer esas obras en esos tiempo debería haber una cohesión organizativa a nivel regional, cosa que se dudaba dando solamente unan imagen de pueblo dividido en tribus y grupos aislados Por poner un ejemplo, en La Carisa, en el campamento astur, se descubrieron montones apilados de cantos rodados que tuvieron que ser llevados allí desde los ríos del valle en un desnivel de mas de mil metros y que parece ser munición de mano y de honda, ademas de restos de murallas. fosos y torres. El experto militar calculó cuanto tierra movería un hombre, cuantos hombre para abastecer de comida y agua el campamento, etcétera. En definitiva cuantas personas fueron necesarias para hacer esas obras e hizo un cálculo. Para soportar ese ejercito que defendiera esas dos vías a la vez, tanto contra los romanos o contra los moros, él calculó que debería haber una población en el territorio asturiano de 200 000 personas.
Es una estimación como cualquier otra, pero este experto llega a ella mediante un razonamiento, que quizás haya que tener en cuenta.

Unos enlace de interés sobre las vis romanas:
Gonzalez Alvarez 2010 Roman mountain roads between Asturias and León. The integration of Asturia transmontana
in the road network of Hispania

https://www.unioviedo.es/reunido/index. ... /view/9429

https://www.lne.es/cuencas/2008/08/24/c ... 68954.html

Defensas del Homon de Faro-canto Busián

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARiJMm6mS7w

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campament ... _La_Carisa

https://www.lne.es/asturias/2018/10/21/ ... 67118.html

Mañana Vásquez El Camín Real
de La Mesa: Volumen II

http://www.viatorimperi.com/la-carisa

I'm writing the story of my Great-Great-Grandmother, Balbina García, from l'AgUería d'Urbiés (Laviana).

It should be finished by tomorrow.It is so amazing, how one person's memory can make things fall into place, just by remembering their connections to each other.

The story of Balbina García

My maternal grandmother MARIA ZAPICO ALONSO, born in Blimea (S. Martin del Rey Aurelio) lived to be 96 years, but the final years she had dementia and could not remember much of her life.