The Descendants of Matthew West

This is a very complex series with a lot of characters either making actual appearances or in the background of the family saga. How many characters? Would you believe over ten thousand? After all, there are real historical characters, like George III or Lachlan M’Gillivray who make appearances over the more than three hundred year sweep of the series; there are totally fictional characters who are not directly part of the West family, like Thomas Ramsey; and there are the family members themselves. A feature of successful families is that they tend to grow throughout the years. In this case, the West family is not only successful from an economic and reputational standpoint, but most especially from a genetic standpoint. The founder of the family has engineered genes which make his descendants healthier, longer-lived, and more likely to produce large numbers of offspring. If a man is fit and healthy until 150 years old, he might outlive several normal wives and have multiple families. Since this starts in 1700, there was also no stigma against large families. People wanted large families for a plethora of reasons at that time. So, a man might have 78 children with three wives as Matthew West did, and because of the health genes, they might all live to reproduce and also have an average number of children that is very high from our modern perspective. This can produce a very rapid increase and wide distribution of such a genetically-successful family. In ten generations, it might theoretically have every person in the world descended from that one source of superior genetic stock.

Also, cousin marriages were very, very common among all classes, but especially among nobility and royalty in the eighteenth century. So, it would not be unusual to find that someone married a first cousin, first cousin once removed, second cousin, etc. George I and his wife were first cousins. There were other examples at that time where double-first cousins married. In some of the Catholic houses, marriages between uncles and their nieces were more frequent than one might hope. One example in reality was in Portugal where Infante Pedro (later King Pedro) married his brother King José’s daughter. In many ways, the Hidden Angels series stories are dependent on those cousin marriages, since the genes for paranormal powers are recessive. To be an “Angel,” one must be descended from Matthew West on both sides. The genes for health and longevity are dominant, but the power genes are recessive.

This matters because if the family spreads out and only 1 in 8 marriages or child-producing relationships are between cousins, they need a lot of descendants to start producing enough Angels to give us enough stories to make a series. So, for every set of Angel siblings you meet in the series, there might be ten or a hundred other family members who are quietly living their lives without stirring up trouble or showing up in the books. This is a very long way of going about saying I have a very large database of family members, and here is one report listing them: Matthew West’s Descendants.

That report is 2.99 Mbytes at this writing and is subject to change. The methods that I have used to generate this family are random within certain parameters. Many of those who have married into the family were real people co-opted for my use. Many of them have very different lives in this fictional universe than they had in our real history, so dates of death may be altered. Still, it is a searchable HTML page, and may help keep people straight as the reader encounters them in stories. I plan to create other reports that will also help the reader understand the often complex relationships and historical changes effected to produce this new world that the Hidden Angels stories occupy.