Six Degrees of Seperation

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In 2001, I started doing the genealogy research on our cemeterians as practice for using internet sites on my own family's genealogy.  Once I had the hang of the software, I went to work on my Seckner and Gilmour forebears and set the cemetery folks aside for a couple of years. Two years later, as a break from my relatives, I returned to the cemeterians. 

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And in doing so, I found an astounding relationship between two supposedly completely unrelated individuals. Which in turn, led me to research the concept of six degrees of separation. 

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I had always thought it referred to genealogical relationships. I was wrong. Six degrees of separation is states that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances (not blood relatives) with no more than five intermediaries. 

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The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called "Chains "

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In 1966, a sociologist, Stanley Milgram, set out to test the hypothesis. He traveled to the mid-western United States and randomly selected a number of people.  He then gave them a wrapped package to be hand delivered to a person (the target) identified only by name, occupation, and general location. In this case, the target was in Massachusetts. 

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The senders were asked to send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis whom they thought would be most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target personally. Although the participants expected the chain to include at least a hundred intermediaries, it took only between five and seven intermediaries to get each package hand delivered!

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Watch this video for an entertaining explanation of the theory and further testings. 

 And in the next posting, I will tell you how a small child buried off in the corner of the cemetery caught my undivided attention and how this theory hit home.