(Belated) Saturday night genealogy fun: Two degrees of separation

Randy Seaver came up with a fun challenge, which Elizabeth Handler has taken up: "Using your ancestral lines, how far back in time can you go with two degrees of separation? That means 'you knew an ancestor, who knew another ancestor.' When was that second ancestor born?"

I read this late last night, and as I climbed into bed to go to sleep, I racked my brain.

Three of my four grandparents were living when I was born; my paternal grandfather had died almost twenty years before I was born, and my maternal grandfather had not been in my mother's life since she was in high school. So I only ever met my grandmothers.

My maternal grandmother, Dorothy PALMER, who actually lived with my family when she was dying of lung cancer, was born in 1918. Her father's father George Bailey PALMER was born in 1850 and died on 15 Dec 1926. He almost certainly knew my grandmother, since they lived in the same county. She would presumably have remembered him, being that she was eight years old when he died.

My great-grandfather, Horace William HOWES, was alive when I was born, but since we never met, it doesn't count...

It seems that I can only back to a great-great grandparent with two degrees of separation. Elizabeth can go back to a third !

Ancestral line: George Bailey PALMER (1850-1926) > Frank Bailey PALMER (1888- 1958) > Dorothy Elizabeth PALMER (1918-1984) > S. HOWES (1937-1999) > Me.