The six degrees of separation theme* has played itself out over and over in my 
life, as if something synchronistic with an eye toward increasing my awareness of the 
concept must surely be going on.

What I take from it:  most simply, how very connected we all are -- brothers & sisters 
whether by blood or not.  The "family of man."  Emphasis on family:  we are one.

This awareness of how connected we all are -- continually reinforced to me in my 
genealogy dabbling -- has pulled my own former lapsed-Catholic self back to God.  
Praise Him, dang if he don't work in the strangest ways.  ':  )

This website contains only a few individuals from my 85,000-person-plus personal
genealogy database.  Questions from other researchers are welcome and all will be
answered, but, depending on the season, with varying speed...

May the wind be always atcher back.  God bless.
~ ~ ~


* "Six degrees of separation" theory background:  the theory that anyone on the planet 
can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances 
that has no more than five intermediaries, first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian 
writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called "Chains."

"In the 1950's, Ithiel de Sola Pool (MIT) and Manfred Kochen (IBM) set out to prove 
the theory mathematically.  Although they were able to phrase the question (given a 
set N of people, what is the probability that each member of N is connected to another 
member via k_1, k_2, k_3...k_n links?), after twenty years they were still unable to 
solve the problem to their own satisfaction.  In 1967, American sociologist Stanley 
Milgram devised a new way to test the theory, which he called 'the small-world 
problem.'  He randomly selected people in the mid-West to send packages to a stranger 
located in Massachusetts.  The senders knew the recipient's name, occupation, and 
general location.  They were instructed to send the package to a person they knew on a 
first-name basis who they thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know 
the target personally.  That person would do the same, and so on, until the package 
was personally delivered to its target recipient.

"....it only took (on average) between five and seven intermediaries to get each 
package delivered.  Milgram's findings were published in Psychology Today and inspired 
the phrase 'six degrees of separation.'  Playwright John Guare popularized the phrase 
when he chose it as the title for his 1990 play of the same name.  Although Milgram's 
findings were discounted after it was discovered that he based his conclusion on a 
very small number of packages, six degrees of separation became an accepted notion in 
pop culture...  ...

"In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University, continued his own earlier 
research into the phenomenon and recreated Milgram's experiment on the Internet.  
Watts used an e-mail message as the 'package' that needed to be delivered, and 
surprisingly, after reviewing the data collected by 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 
157 countries), Watts found that the average number of intermediaries was indeed, six. 
Watts' research, and the advent of the computer age, has opened up new areas of 
inquiry related to six degrees of separation in diverse areas of network theory such 
as as power grid analysis, disease transmission, graph theory, corporate 
communication, and computer circuitry." -- Source,  WhatIs.TechTarget.com 
 .