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Consider someone born in 1975. Now consider generations averaging 25 years, a very modest number over the past several centuries as a whole.
Now let's go back to the year 1000 and see how many ancestors that person has? That would be 2 to the 39th power, or roughly 550 billion. Since this number is considerably more than the number of all species of the genus homo that have ever lived since it arose over two million years ago, there's obviously a lot of overlap, with single individuals being (for example) your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather numerous times over. There's also obviously a lot of saturation of the European gene pool the farther back we go. And remember, the further back the more kingdoms there were to provide ancestral royalty.
Charlemagne? Tens of millions of Americans are probably descended from him, even if the vast majority can't trace it.
Ironically, a week before this thread was posted I deleted a whole folder of links devoted to how many people were descended from Charlemagne, specifically.
So I went and found some of the pages of interest, just now. I'm not even speaking about descendants of nobility who received land grants in the New World at this point, only descendants of Charlemagne.
Going to repost this message from Genealogist Stewart Baldwin, who coordinates the Henry II project, among other things. This is not a mathematical treatment, which is fascinating in its own right.
Quote:
Regarding the discussion about the probability of being descended from
Charlemagne (or from some other king of earlier times), there are two
additional points which I think are relevant here.
1. In medieval times, members of the royalty (and the upper class in
general) had a much better survival rate than the average individual, and
as a result, tended to leave a larger number of descendants than members of
the lower classes (who were more likely to die before having issue). (This
observation is probably not valid for modern times since reliable
birth-control methods became available, but is OK in a society where all
social classes had large families.)
2. Downward social mobility was much more common than upward social
mobility. If most of the wealth went to the eldest son, then the younger
ones had to take a step down in the social ranks, and if the estate was
equally divided among a large family, then all children would usually be
less well off than the parents. The younger son of a younger son (of a
younger son, etc.) would then often have to take another step down the
social scale. As a result, the younger lines of prominent families often
faded into obscurity (and poverty), and intermixed with the general
population.
The good news is that both of these effects tend to increase the
probability of being descended from Charlemagne. The bad news is that no
documentation survives for the overwhelming majority of such descents.
Here's a nice royal descents page, which sometimes references the pages of Leo Van de Pas who has put in tireless effort for many years into linking up people of note up and down the ages and is also worth looking at.
Here is a bit of background on the page, from Atlantic magazine:
Quote:
Humphrys began to notice something odd. Whenever a reliable family tree was available, almost anyone of European ancestry turned out to be descended from English royalty—even such unlikely people as Hermann Göring and Daniel Boone. Humphrys began to think that such descent was the rule rather than the exception in the Western world, even if relatively few people had the documents to demonstrate it.
Humphrys compiled his family genealogies first on paper and then using computers. He did much of his work on royal genealogies in the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web was just coming into general use. He began to put his findings on Web pages, with hyperlinks connecting various lines of descent. Suddenly dense networks of ancestry jumped out at him. "I'd known these descents were interconnected, but I'd never known how much," he told me. "You can't see the connections reading the printed genealogies, because it's so hard to jump from tree to tree. The problem is that genealogies aren't two-dimensional, so any attempt to put them on paper is more or less doomed from the start. They aren't three-dimensional, either, or you could make a structure. They have hundreds of dimensions."
It also touches on the common ancestor question, which is neat.
Small excerpt:
Quote:
But why Charlemagne? It is not without some reason that Charlemagne comes up so often as a symbolic ancestor—the “Father of Europe.” Living from 747 (or 748) to 814, he was the first Germanic king of the Middle Ages to reassemble a large portion of the defunct Western Roman Empire under his personal rule, which stretched into what is now Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Austria, and Germany. Aside from being named ‘Emperor’ (actually, ‘Augustus’) by a grateful Roman papacy in the year 800, he more importantly instituted many features of a successful medieval government, and spread that model throughout Western Europe, sowing the seeds for the development of several later nations. Yet his empire did not last beyond the civil wars between his grandsons, thirty years after his death in 814. One interesting point is that the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire through a combination of infighting and opportunistic invasions (by the Vikings, among others), actually insured that his own descendants spread throughout the European population: rather than remaining as a self-contained imperial aristocracy, his descendants were dispersed and then isolated from one another in the relative political vacuum of the tenth century. By this time they were spread everywhere in Western Europe and the British Isles. Subsequently their own descendants spread and married into Scandinavia and Slavic Europe, and finally to Greece and the Middle East during the Crusades.
I'm not the member listed, I do not really go in for that kind of club, personally. I just find the linking of the present day generations to historical figures fascinating, and enjoy the detective work along the way.
Anyway, the colonial issue is something else, which I might post on, and I might not. The OP seems to be alone in her view, and the only reason to post on it would be to offer resources to anyone who might come across this thread later.
Anyway, the colonial issue is something else, which I might post on, and I might not. The OP seems to be alone in her view, and the only reason to post on it would be to offer resources to anyone who might come across this thread later.
bek who is going to want to tell their kid that their grandfather was a hung chicken thief in new orleans?
ROFL, my ancestor on my father's side, was hung due to crimes of the crown by my ancestor on my mother's side!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marissa23
Still, even if you were to trace your ancestors to the 1500s, it is unlikely that you'll find royalty if your close ancestors in the 19th century were peasants or factory workers. I only looked at trees of royalty and also looked at the number of people in line to the British throne and the number of royal descendants in other countries. At best they number at about low-to-mid five figures.
Journals and tales of family history aren't obviously records. However, they can be a starting point. I know a lot of people who don't even know the names of their ancestors born in 1850.
Not true. I can trace my ancestors to WELL past the 1600's, but in American since 1607 or so, they were descendants of royalty that could afford to have land grants and such in the new world. Fast forward to the 1970's and you have my grandpa who was/is a farmer, who is farming on the SAME tracts of land that his royal ancestors founded when they moved here!
Quote:
Originally Posted by suzy_q2010
In my own tree, my most recent brick walls were born in 1804 (two of them) and 1821 (one). In my husband's tree, a maternal great grandmother is elusive, but I think that was deliberate on her part, since she is apparently a bigamist. I know who her parents are, but I cannot find when and where she died.
On one side, I can't get any farther back than my great grandfather. My Mom's Mom's Dad. H e was an abandoned orphaned twin! Should be easy right?! WRONG, I can't get past him on that branch, no matter what!
Quote:
Originally Posted by EnricoV
I'm sorry, but you're just wrong. I do a lot of descendency genealogy. A couple of my projects are New England immigrants (both of whom who do have royal ancestry, by the way). A reason I love to do that kind of genealogy is, it's fascinating to see the waxing and waning of family fortunes through the generations. One of them has 37,000+ and the other 29,000+ identified decendants. And that's just from the immigrant to the US.
You keep focusing on the people in line of succession to the British throne. That's just not a large percentage of the "royal" descendants.
They aren't counting in German, Norse, French, Scottish, Irish, etc... just to name a few.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marissa23
I'm not just focusing on the people in line of succession to the British throne. Like I wrote previously, I'm also including descendants of other European royal houses from 1700. They can't possibly number more than 40k since most of them intermarried and have been marrying nobility and commoners only for about the past 150 years.
Not true. Take for example the Plantagenet house. I have multiple ancestors with that family line. In fact, a few of them were founders of this country!
Generally if you're alive today, no matter WHERE you're ethnically from, it's because your ancestors were survivors. They went through wars, famine, disease (the black death anyone?) and a lot more, and here you are today in the 21st century, alive. Those that survived were those with power, or those who were just very lucky. It's very likely that many people do have nobility somewhere down their bloodline.
My great grandma's maiden name is the name of MANY historic European kings, in fact the current king of Spain has that name, as did his father. The name is Alfonso. I looked up the name and the list of royalty with that name is immense, which has got me curious if it is possible that I have very close heritage to those kings. The name's spelling varies in countries, in French it's Alphonse in German it's Alfons. But Royalty seems to show up quite a lot.
Haven't read all the posts, so this may have already been mentioned, but many years ago, I read the reason so many are linked to royalty is due to royals being more apt to travel far and wide, spreading their seed liberally amongst the masses.
I read somewhere that Charlemagne had many illegitimate children. I guess a lot of us people of European descent could be descended from them.
Muhammad is also believed to have millions of descendants, some of whom aren't even Muslim (many of the Moors who were converted were among his descendants). Most of them descend from his youngest daughter Fatima, though there are probably others descended from his older three daughters.
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