![]() ![]() ![]() “As a result, King Richard I … may not related to King Edward after all.” “Kings tended to have a wife and many consorts or mistresses,” he says. Dale Myers, founder of the Colorado Genealogical Research Company, agrees. Kirill Chashchin, a Russian genealogical researcher, says that “almost royals” – illegitimate children and those (like Princess Diana) who show some royal connections but not a clear lineage – have muddied the waters. In recent years morganatic marriages – aka when a royal marries someone of lesser status, à la Prince William and Kate Middleton – have become more and more common around the world, increasing the number of people with a royal claim. Here’s another way to look at it: if you’re descended from royalty, it might be via a prince, a princess – or a pauper. You don’t need to be fully – or even legitimately – royal to have royal blood Translation: if your ancestors hailed from a country or region where royals and commoners intermarried, you have a better chance of being descended from royalty. But in England, says Clark, the “noble classes have always been fairly open to incorporating wealthy commoners … So a large share of the modern English will be related to someone in the past who was part of the nobility.” In some countries, that class door is firmly shut. “In most cases,” says Taylor, “royal families work to marry within the same social circle.” Gregory Clark, an economics professor at UC Davis who studies the genealogy of social mobility, says that means “the likelihood that you are related to royalty, if you went back as far as 1300 or 1066, depends on how closed a class nobles were”. A wealthy Scandinavian man is far more likely to marry a well-to-do woman from Sweden or Norway than a poor one from Saskatchewan. That means that people tend to mate with those who are most like themselves in terms of geography, language and socioeconomic status. ![]() Royal + commoner + intermarriage = higher odds of regal descentĪs Chang acknowledged in his study, most mating isn’t random – it’s assortative. In other words, mathematically speaking, we’re all related to royalty. Similarly, everyone of European ancestry must descend from Muhammad.” Meanwhile, “Confucius, Nefertiti, and just about any other ancient historical figure who was even moderately prolific must today be counted among everyone’s ancestors”. More recently, Rutherford has demonstrated that virtually everyone in Europe is indeed descended from royalty – specifically from Charlemagne, who ruled western Europe from 768 to 814.Ī 2002 article offers more clarifying examples: “Almost everyone in the New World must be descended from English royalty – even people of predominantly African or Native American ancestry, because of the long history of intermarriage in the Americas. In Europe, where lineages have been closely studied, that ancestor was someone who lived just 600 years ago.Ī 2013 study from Peter Ralph and Graham Coop built on Chang’s research, proving that all Europeans come from the same people. ![]() In 1999, the Yale statistician Joseph Chang showed that if you go back far enough – say, 32 generations, or 900 years – you’d find that everyone alive today shares a common ancestor. If you’re European – or even descended from Europeans – you’re probably related to royalty If you’re thinking of climbing your family tree in search of royal fruit, here are a few things to consider. Genealogists say that the work of identifying royal lineage – whether to establish “direct descent” (a key to inheritance and social status) or simply to satisfy curiosity – is helped and hindered by a number of factors. Throw in other factors that enlarge and complicate lineage – invasions and migrations, wars and revolutions – and you can see that humanity is indeed a web of overlapping and enmeshed networks of descent. This paradox exists because, as Rutherford writes: “Pedigrees begin to fold in on themselves a few generations back.” Meaning “you can be, and in fact are, descended from the same individual many times over”. If we went back a thousand years, each of us would have over a trillion direct ancestors, which is more than all the humans who have ever lived. The number of ancestors we have increases exponentially, not linearly - more like a meshed web than a branched family tree, says the geneticist Adam Rutherford. It “might identify that two individuals share a common ancestor within a certain number of generations, but research is still needed to identify who that common ancestor might be.”Īnd ancestral math is messy. “DNA testing only reveals a general ethnic breakdown that changes over time, as the science becomes further refined,” says Joshua Taylor, president of the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society. ![]()
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