#id still stay below 1500 but eh :/

[path0logicalfacade]

ik its like 10:30pm which means that if i feel horrible about everything in my life i should go to sleep. but i just started going on a breakdown so good i rly need to see where it gets me this time.

[immortalmint]

How many people on the Boiling Isles are related to Caleb? And are Dell and/or Gwendolyn related?

In The Owl House, there is strong evidence the Clawthornes are related to Caleb Wittebane and Evelyn (Clawthorne?). Many fans point to a connection through Gwendolyn, via the ‘lyn family suffix shared by Gwendolyn, Edalyn, and Evelyn. There is also Gwendolyn’s family knowledge of a human previously living in Bonesborough:

“My great-grandmother told me about a human who once lived here. But one day he just vanished. Rumor has it he left something in the library, and if you can find out more about him...”

A Gwendolyn connection is very plausible. We’ll get into family resemblances later.

But a connection through Dell has merit as well, given his palisman’s striking resemblance to Flapjack. We’ll call our yellow cardinal Biscuit for now. (Biscuits were ship rations in the late 1500s onward, and absolutely have been eaten for breakfast. They work in any meal. Every meal. Caleb was poor and hungry, okay?)

The visual clues we get are intermingled between Dell, Caleb, Biscuit, and Flapjack. When Dell is first injured by the Owl Beast, the red blood over his closed eye makes the same shape as Flapjack’s scar. Both Dell and Flapjack are wounded in the same eye, their left. These wounds share symbolic similarities, as they were both from family members: Dell’s injury was caused unintentionally by Eda when she was startled and turned into in Owl Beast form, and Flapjack’s injury likely occurred during Philip’s failed attempt to murder his sister-in-law Evelyn and Philip’s (also unintentional?) murder of his brother Caleb.

(As for physical appearance, note the similar nose shape between middle-aged Dell and teenage Hunter in the screenshots below.)

Looking at older Dell, the scar’s color and shape greatly resembles Flapjack’s head. Both Flapjack and Biscuit have two-peaks of feathers crowning their heads, similar shaped face and chest feather patterns, bicolor wings of light and dark from their respective color pallets, and identically shaped feet. These birds were clearly a matched set, Biscuit likely being carved by Caleb to complement Evelyn’s Flapjack. Sometime after Evelyn’s death, Flapjack presumably left for the Bat Queen, and Biscuit stayed on with the family (I strongly believe Biscuit was Caleb’s palisman, and bonded with his young daughter to relay the love of the father she was deprived of). Biscuit continues to stay with the family to this day, adopting a young witch every 3 to 4 generations. She now belongs with Dell.

It’s also telling that all the Clawthorne family palismen are birds.

If you’re wondering why Biscuit is a she, check out the Northern Cardinal, which is quite common in Connecticut. I took pictures from this lovely bird website: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Northern_Cardinal/id

Male Northern Cardinals are red, and females are supposedly “brown,” but if you told me that bird looked yellow, I’d agree with you.

What about family appearance? We’ve compared Dell to Caleb/Hunter. So let’s take a look at Evelyn. We’ve got a lot less to go on here. Just a few memory photos from Philip’s mindscape. But from what we can see, Evelyn has impressively full hair very similar to Gwendolyn and Eda. The washed out colors of the photo make it difficult to determine an exact hair color, but brown to reddish-brown seems plausible.

Looking at the Clawthornes, we see various shades of brown, red, and orange (yeah… I know they’re still called redheads, but that’s because the word ‘orange’ wasn’t in the language when redheads first showed up.) These are all plausible hair colors for the descendants of Caleb and Evelyn.

Am I saying that both Gwendolyn and Dell are related to Caleb and Evelyn?

Yes!

Yes, I am.

‘But isn’t that gross?’ you may wonder.

Eh, not really. They’re around 13 generations away from their shared common ancestor, Caleb and Evelyn’s daughter. We’ll call her Caylyn for convenience. With each generation, the percentage of DNA from a relative goes down by half. Example: You share 50% of your DNA with your mom, but only 25% of your DNA with your grandpa. The calculation is 1/(2^generation) x 100%, where that little ^ character means “to the power of.” So by the time we get to Dell and Gwendolyn, each would only have 1/(2^13) x 100% = 0.012% shared DNA. That’s very low risk for hereditary birth defects. You probably don’t have your own family tree documented well enough to avoid hooking up with your 13th cousin.

‘But what are the odds of two Caylyn relatives hooking up?’

After 13+ generations on an island? It’s more likely than you think!

Now that you’ve been lured in with screenshots and pretty birds, it’s time to get to my favorite part: MATH!

I mean, EVEN MORE MATH!

And dates. Yeah. They’re important too.

From Masha’s account, in 1613, the orphans Philip and Caleb Wittebane arrive in Gravesfield. Based on how small the boys are compared to a butter churner meant for adults, it’s safe to assume Caleb is 10 or younger. Philip is likely 7 or younger.

Now fast-forward to Evelyn’s pregnancy. Philip has a full beard in this photo, which means he’s at least 18, more likely in his early-to-mid 20s (most white males can’t grow a full beard until their 20s). That would put the date sometime between 1625 and 1630 for Caylyn’s birth.

To simplify our generational model, we’re going to assume that Caylyn was born in 1625 and that she and her descendants had 2 surviving children each when they were approximately 25 years old. That means in 1650, Caylyn had 2 children, and Evelyn became a grandmother.

If you’re wondering about my assumptions, the birthrate didn’t fall below 2 children in the USA until the 1970s. And before 1800, the birthrate was over 7 children! But when we look back at the 1600s-1800s, 40-50% of children died before adulthood, leaving only 3.5-4 children surviving to have kids of their own. I went with the assumption of 2 children per generation to account for additional factors such as people deciding not to have kids or cultural differences in family sizes that may have existed in the Boiling Isles. In all likelihood, Caleb’s descendants had a higher birthrate than 2. But we’ll stick with 2 to be conservative, and to make the math easy to see the effects of doubling!

Let’s finish the century out with 4 great-grandchildren (2 x 2, or 2^2) in 1675 and 8 great-great-grandchildren (2 x 2 x 2, or 2^3) by 1700. We get another 4 generations of descendants every century after this. So, by 1800, we have 128 (2^7). By 1900, we have 2,048 (2^11). And by the year 2000, we have 32,768 (2^15) new babies born related to a human! That’s a lot of people! And if we add together the most recent 3 generations, there’s even more living relations to Caleb on the Isles. At least 57,344 people!

Dell and Gwendolyn are 13 generations away from Caylyn, with birthdays approximately in 1950. I get this date based on Eda being in her mid to late 40s at the start of The Owl House (2020) according to Dana Terrance (so Eda’s birthday is ~1975). Her parents would be ~25 years older than her. So, when Dell and Gwendolyn meet, our number is around 8,192 (2^13) descendants of Caleb in their generation. And in all likelihood, Caleb’s descendants are more concentrated on the forearm where Evelyn originally lived. This makes it extremely likely that at least some of Caleb’s descendants marry each other.

How likely? First we need to know the approximate population of the Boiling Isles in the 1950s. Dana Terrance said the BI is roughly the size of Vermont in this interview. And in 1950, Vermont had a population of 377,700. We’ll use this as our rough population number for the 1950s BI. For the group born in 1950 (8,192 of which are descendants of Caleb), they make up 2.17% of the total population. But if we think about the number of people in that generation who would marry someone of similar age, we’re looking at the 20-30 year-old bracket, which is about 10% of the total population, or 37,770 people. And 8,192 is 21.7% of the people in Dell and Gwendolyn’s generation (gen 13). It isn’t a question of if two Caleb descendants got married, it’s a question of how many marriages!

(If you’re curious: [chance of person 1 being a Caleb descendant] x [chance of person 2 being a descendant] x [half of gen 13 population], because we’re looking at pairs of people, not individuals. So 21.7% of 21.7% = 4.7% of marriages in gen 13, times half the gen 13 population (18,885) is 887 marriages!)

Dell and Gwendolyn both being descendants of Caleb isn’t even that rare! The Clawthornes are one of multiple families where both sides of the family can claim human ancestry. It’s amazing how far one person’s genetics can spread in 400 years of breeding!

Alright, let’s get back to the main question: How many people on the Boiling Isles are related to Caleb?

By the Day of Unity (2022), we’re close enough to generation 16 (2025), which is 65,536 (2^16) babies, that we can look at a range between 2020 and 2025. In 2020, the 3 generations alive are 8,192 (2^13), 16,384 (2^14), and 32,768 (2^15), or 57,344 total living descendants. In 2025, the 3 generations alive are 16,384 (2^14), 32,768 (2^15), and 65,536 (2^16), or 114,688 total living descendants. In 2022, Vermont had a total population of 647,064 people, and we’re assuming the Boiling Isles population grew similarly. So we have between 8.9% and 17.8% of the BI population related to Caleb on the Day of Unity.

Belos wasn’t only attempting genocide against witches. Philip Wittebane was trying to kill thousands of his own relatives.

Food for thought.