According to Family Search data from the Mormon church, my wife is a direct descendant of Odin av Asgard, the king of the Norse gods. I found it on several different places. His residence is given as "western Asia" but they've got him listed as living around 200 BC, whereas he lived much before that.
Her god ancestor beats your Adam (who was just the dust of the earth).
My ex-wife's grandfather was a professional Mormon genealogical researcher in the 1950s. He lived in Idaho Falls and ran a small LDS bookstore out of his home, which was just a block or two from the temple. Every month he would take the Greyhound bus to Los Angeles and do genealogical research in the Huntington Library. He charged 50¢ per name to his Mormon clients. He had traced his family back to Adam and Eve, and I have seen the pedigree (my ex got it as part of the divorce settlement).
It is not hard to get back to Adam and Eve if you have Jewish ancestry, since Jews kept detailed genealogies (except for Lehi, who didn't know he was of the tribe of Manasseh). I almost was able to hook my wife's family tree into a Jewish Levite in Spain in the 16th century who was descended from the Babylonian Jews. That would have connected up to Adam, using the Bible genealogies, since all Levites had to demonstrated their being direct descendants of Levi. But that one connection turned out to be incorrect. So she had to be content with her descent from Odin.
My ex's grandfather got caught making up data (at 50¢ per name) and was banned from submitting further data. I often wonder if they were able to remove all the false data from their database, or maybe it's still there??
That's badass. You should have her bear her testimony on genealogy over the pulpit with that info.
I'd like to bear my testimony on the importance of family history work. I am so incredibly grateful for the modern tools we have to discover our ancestral ties. Thanks to family search, I discovered that I was related to Odin of Asguard and I am extremely happy that I was able to do his temple work. I could feel the spirit as I did his work and I know he will be there to greet me at the veil.
I was recently contacted by a Nigerian princess who informed methat a relative I didn't even know I had recently and tragically died, and I'm in for 15,000,000 USD! Also apparently descended from A&E.
As far as I know the only claim to fame that I have, as traced through genealogy, is that one of lil Joe's body guards was a relative on mine. The only happy consultation I get from this is that he must have been a very poor body guard or he was on a lunch break when the mob showed up.
Back in the middle ages various kings and nobles traced their ancestry back to Adam. This was done to give them a noble ancestry (they wouldn't fudge things would they?). So all anyone now has to do is hook into one of those old lines.
I'm something like 130 or so generations from Adam according to one of these genealogies that some relative, decades ago, hooked our family line into.
Nobody takes Adam and Eve literally any more except fundamentalists and Mormons. Mormons, unfortunately for them, are stuck with Adam and Eve, Noah's flood, and the Tower of Babel, all of which can be shown to be mythical and not historical.
What would Mormonism be like if Joseph Smith had gotten a revelation that the Earth was flat?*
*Don't make fun of Flat-Earthers . . . they are found all around the globe.