In researching our family history and genealogy, this thought never occurred to me. How many members of my family tree may have crossed the land bridge?
I know that sounds like a strange question, but think about it. My family history research tracks my family back through several generations in Washington State, then back to Michigan, Wisconsin, up into Canada, to New York, and then to England and Europe.
I haven’t gone back much further yet, but there is talk of American Indian in our family tree, I just can’t seem to find who or where that rumor came from. If so, then there is a possibly that some branch in my family might have been one of the ancient natives who traveled across the land bridge between what is now Russia and Alaska, to come to North America.
If so, then researching my family history takes on a new light and articles like this, Founding Fathers and Mothers: How Many Crossed The Land Bridge? from ScienceDaily, has a new impact on my research.
According to the article, researchers now have a realistic “estimate of how many ancients made that ice age trek across the long-lost land bridge from Asia to become the first Native Americans.” Wow.
Tracking research that is beyond my total comprehension, Jody Hey, a professor of genetics at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, figured out how to track population divergence, where a group split off from its ancestral population, using DNA and computer modeling. The research is fascinating and gives us a whole new insight into what it means to track our family history.