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The podcast about everyday stuff that turns out to be older, weirder, and way more meaningful than we realized.
00:00 Introduction
You spit in a tube. You seal it, mail it off, and wait. Six weeks later, an email arrives: "Your results are ready." You click. You scroll. You find out you're 43% this, 22% that, and 3% something you didn't expect. And for reasons you can't fully explain, it matters to you. A lot.
Maybe you've never taken the test. But you've still got a name in a family Bible. A photo on a wall. A story about where your people came from.
Why does lineage feel so important?
It's probably a folk thing.
[Intro Music]
Welcome to It's Probably a Folk Thing — the podcast about everyday experiences that turn out to be older, weirder, and far more meaningful than we realized. I'm your host, Aaron Crawford, and today we’re talking about the importance of bloodlines.
1:04 Segment 1: The King Under the Parking Lot
To begin, we’re going on a bit of a journey back in time.
In 2012, archaeologists in England dug up a skeleton from under a parking lot. It turned out to be Richard III — the last English king killed in battle. He died in 1485, defending his throne.
The archaeologists knew it was likely Richard – he was in the right place, with the wounds history said he’d have. But they needed to confirm the identification. To do so researchers compared his DNA to living people who are supposedly descended from the same royal family. And this is where it really gets interesting.
The maternal DNA matched. Richard was exactly who they thought he was. But the paternal DNA — the Y-chromosome, passed from father to son — it didn't match. Somewhere in the line between the medieval royal family and the present day, a mother claimed her child had a royal father – but the father was someone else.
The patrilineal chain broke. And nobody noticed. For centuries.
Now, here's why that's remarkable. In Renaissance England, the father-to-son bloodline wasn't just important. It was everything. It determined who had the right to rule. Wars were fought over it. Tens of thousands of people died over it. The entire political order rested on the assumption that the chain was intact.
And it wasn't.
02:37 Segment 2: The Folk Belief That Outlived the Kingdom
In the American ideal, hereditary monarchy is long dead. The Constitution doesn't just ignore titles of nobility — it specifically forbids them. "All men are created equal" was a direct challenge to the notion that birth determines authority.
But that was a political argument. It said bloodline shouldn't determine who holds power. It didn't say (and it couldn't say) that your bloodline doesn't affect who you are.
Because we clearly still believe it does.
We trace family trees. We keep names in Bibles. We say things like "you have your grandmother's eyes" and "it runs in the family" and "blood is thicker than water." We visit our ancestors’ homelands and cook their recipes. We feel a pull toward places we've never been, because someone in our line came from there.
Nobody teaches you to care about this. There's no curriculum. You absorb it. You hear your parents talk about where the family came from. You see the old photos. You learn that your name means something, that your people came from somewhere. You learn that you belong to a line.
That's folklore. It spreads informally. It carries meaning. And it's doing cultural work that we don't always notice.
03:56 Segment 3: What the Folk Belief Does
So what work is it doing?
First, it gives us belonging. Knowing where you come from connects you to something larger than yourself. Bloodline becomes a shorthand for "these are my people." It's the same impulse that drives people to learn ancestral languages, to travel to countries they've never lived in, to feel at home in a place because their great-grandparents once did.
Second, it gives us continuity. The idea is that something of your ancestors lives on in you. It may be their eyes, their stubbornness, or their way of telling a story. That makes the passage of time feel a little less final. You're a link in a chain that existed long before you were born, and it will continue long after you leave. It binds us to the past and the future.
Third, it gives us a narrative. It's not just that you exist. It's that you exist because of a long series of choices, migrations, survivals, and accidents that all had to happen in a particular order. That's a powerful story. And humans are storytelling animals.
05:07 Segment 4: Not Science, Not Commerce
Now, it's worth pausing here to name what this isn't.
It's not genetics. Genetics is science. It tells you about haplogroups and migration patterns and disease markers. It's useful and fascinating, but it's not why your heart pounds when you open that email.
And it's not the genealogy industry. Companies like AncestryDNA and 23andMe have figured out how to monetize the impulse. But they didn't create it. People were keeping family Bibles and telling origin stories long before there was a product to sell.
The folk belief in bloodline is older than the science and older than the commerce. Both of those tap into something that was already there — the informally transmitted, deeply felt conviction that where you come from is part of who you are.
That's the folklore. The science gives it data. The companies give it a platform. But the belief itself? That's folk culture, and it was here first.
06:07 Segment 5: Two Systems at Once
So we're left with something interesting. We live in two systems at the same time.
Our political system says lineage shouldn't determine power. And that's a good principle. We fought a revolution over it.
But our folk culture says lineage still matters for identity – for who we are. And that's not a contradiction. It's two different systems doing two different jobs. One governs how we distribute authority. The other governs how we understand ourselves.
Medieval and Renaissance England collapsed those into one system: blood determined both who you were and who got to rule.
The American Founders separated them. But they only dismantled half. They only dismantled the political half.
The folk half — the part that lives in kitchens and family reunions and old photo albums and late-night scrolling through DNA results — that one's still running.
And it's worth asking why. Why does the folklore preserve these feelings of blood ties? Folklore sometimes preserves truths that outlast the systems built on top of them. The folk impulse toward lineage survived the fall of monarchy. It survived the Enlightenment. It survived modernity. Every generation has had reasons to let go of it, and no generation has.
Maybe that persistence isn't just social mechanics. Maybe the folk are onto something. Maybe it tells us something about what actually matters.
07:44 Closing
And maybe that's what makes the Richard III discovery so fascinating. It's not just that a king was found under a parking lot. It's that the DNA exposed the fragility of a system that people believed in completely — and died for — for centuries. The political system built on bloodline broke.
But the folk belief in bloodline? The quiet, informal, kitchen-table kind? The kind that has nothing to do with thrones and everything to do with knowing who your people are?
That one never even cracked.
It's definitely a folk thing.
Until Next Time.