Royal couples' descendants

[The Stuart Runaway]

This post about is 'common' genealogy as well as royal, but I thought I'd post it anyway - it'll make sense in a minute. I'm sure everyone's heard of the maths proof that every European, tradesman or royal, descends from Charlemagne due to the sheer force of doubling. 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8, 16, 32, 64... those numbers end up being HUGE very quickly. If you take 25 years as a generation, someone born in 1970 will most likely have all 64 of their four-times-great-grandparents living in 1820 as six generations have been counted back. Following this method, logically you're just going to end up with Charlemagne with an ancestor, documented proof or not, because the number of ancestors beats the number of people in Europe at the time.

This got me thinking - if we were to apply this to individual countries that have or had monarchies, which monarch and his wife would be 'parents of their nation', and the filled-in so-and-so to "everyone living in [blank] with native [blank] ancestry descends from so-and-so"? I think the answer to that would be - unless anyone wants to prove me wrong in my suspicions - the monarch with plenty of grandchildren that was ruling at the point where the number of direct speculative ancestors outnumbers the population at the time. If this is true, then the 'parents' of some nations might go like this:

Scotland - James I of Scots and Lady Joan Beaufort
England - Edward III of England and Philippa of Hainault
France - Philippe VI of France and Joan of Burgundy
Germany - Maximillan I, Holy Roman Emperor & Mary, Duchess of Burgundy

There might be several flaws and holes in my logic, but it's a theory I thought to be interesting, and I'd love to try and figure out the truth/solution.

 

[Gawin]

Hello!

The probability that most Englishmen & women are descended from Edward III has also been discussed elsewhere:

Probability of descending from Edward III
https://community.dur.ac.uk/a.r.millard/genealogy/EdwardIIIDescent.php


soc.genealogy.medieval
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.genealogy.medieval/fi_E7hBjQcc/oFv0GXhvBwAJ

Gawin

 

[High King of Erin]

You are quite right. It is fascinating. However, I feel the monarchs you have provided are a little recent, except Edward III. Philippe VI was of the Valois dynasty in France, and as such does not have many, if any, recorded descendants.
James I is a similar story. If you were to say, maybe, Robert the Bruce, that might be a little more accurate.

In any case, the Progenitor of all Irish people is undisputedly Niall Noígíallach, also known as Niall of the Nine Hostages. He is also the ancestor of most European Royal families.

Regardless, I'm glad you brought this up, because it is truly fascinating. No insult or rudeness intended, just constructive additions. Have a good day!

 

[Kataryn]

This post about is 'common' genealogy as well as royal, but I thought I'd post it anyway - it'll make sense in a minute. I'm sure everyone's heard of the maths proof that every European, tradesman or royal, descends from Charlemagne due to the sheer force of doubling. 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8, 16, 32, 64... those numbers end up being HUGE very quickly. If you take 25 years as a generation, someone born in 1970 will most likely have all 64 of their four-times-great-grandparents living in 1820 as six generations have been counted back. Following this method, logically you're just going to end up with Charlemagne with an ancestor, documented proof or not, because the number of ancestors beats the number of people in Europe at the time.

This got me thinking - if we were to apply this to individual countries that have or had monarchies, which monarch and his wife would be 'parents of their nation', and the filled-in so-and-so to "everyone living in [blank] with native [blank] ancestry descends from so-and-so"? I think the answer to that would be - unless anyone wants to prove me wrong in my suspicions - the monarch with plenty of grandchildren that was ruling at the point where the number of direct speculative ancestors outnumbers the population at the time. If this is true, then the 'parents' of some nations might go like this:

Scotland - James I of Scots and Lady Joan Beaufort
England - Edward III of England and Philippa of Hainault
France - Philippe VI of France and Joan of Burgundy
Germany - Maximillan I, Holy Roman Emperor & Mary, Duchess of Burgundy

There might be several flaws and holes in my logic, but it's a theory I thought to be interesting, and I'd love to try and figure out the truth/solution.

I think one flaw is that there was such a strict class system in place and religious laws that it is difficult to just judge from the idea that there are more ancestors than people, so each person today has to be descended from each person living back then.



Of course we know that noble males, especially Royals, only rarely married below their station. But they may have had illegitimate children, so how to put that fact into statistics?



Then we have to put into account how much travelling was done during these time and by whom. For bloodlines need to be spread like deadly viruses to reach anyone in the end. Legitimate children of Royals tended to travel more than illegitimate ones, eg daughters marrying to foreign courts and their brothers visiting. But would the brothers (for rarely the Royal women had the illegitmate children) spread their blood over the class barriers to lower-class women and their offspring? How often did thatz statistically happen, so that this one bloodline we are looking at became part of the "people's blood"? With Charlemagne one can imagine, as his realm was so large and then shared between three sons, the statistical chance is quite large but what about the Conqueror? Only 200 years later?



I don't want to disclaim the theory but I think it has holes in it...

 

[Osipi]

I think one flaw is that there was such a strict class system in place and religious laws that it is difficult to just judge from the idea that there are more ancestors than people, so each person today has to be descended from each person living back then.

It was that class system that actually is the culprit of just why so many of us today can trace a family tree back to some royal or some noble or aristocrat.

One reason I find it very plausible that its possible that a great percentage of our own "ancestors" can be traced back to royal and noble ancestors is that we only have to look to how these people lived. They had a better chance of staying alive because of being royalty or the nobility and had access to being able to isolate themselves, have access to better nutrition and the ways and means of protecting themselves from things such as the Black Death resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia and peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351 or The Great Plague, lasting from 1665 to 1666, was the last major epidemic of the bubonic plague to occur in England. There were a whole lot of epidemics that went around and it was mostly the lower classes and those with poor nutrition that didn't survive to pass on DNA.

It was those that survived that had descendants. ?

 

[JR76]

King Gustav I of Sweden is said to have at least 250 000 descendants today of which 24 000 are in Sweden. The articles I've read about it are a bit unclear, but point towards that. King Gustav married three times and had eleven children with his first two wives Katarina of Sachsen-Lauenburg and Margareta Leijonhufvud. Nine of these gave him grandchildren.
Many of his descendants have multiple lines of descent including the current King of Sweden with 91 lines of descent, Prince Georg Friedrich of Prussia 127 lines of descent, the King of Spain with 129 lines of descent and Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece with a whopping 198 lines of descent.

 

[Osipi]

And now for something totally different......

Its possible that there is some truth to the fact that Scotland is named after an Egyptian princess that emigrated there eons ago. That is mostly myth but there has been recent studies into the similarities between the inhabitants of Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands of Scotland to to the Dogon tribe of Mali of Africa. Skara Brae is dated at 5,000 years old while the Dogon (which still exists to this day) dates back to 3,200 BC.

Laird Scranton has explored this in depth in his book "The Mystery of Skara Brae" which I recommend as it is very informative. He also points to the idea that the Dogon were the ancestors of what would become dynastic Egypt and a remarkable similarity is that Egypt had its pharaohs and an area very close to Skara Brae are known as the Faroe Islands. The similarities of the layout of a Skara Brae community very closely resembles the Dogon communities of today which hasn't changed much since antiquity.

A bit fanciful on my part to include this but its an area of reading that fascinates me. The further back in history I go, the further back I still want to go. No matter where we come from or who we're descended from, they all had a long history of descendacy to begin with.

 

[Lilyflo]

To me it's entirely plausible that most ordinary people today with British ancestry are descended from royalty in the Middle Ages. The mathematic calculations appear to explain how it works (roughly). It's the case within my own family & it's easy to see how younger sons of younger sons of daughters of younger sons etc can see a line go from a King to a Princess to Earls to Viscounts & finally to farmers (my great grandfather).

 

[Lilyflo]

Of course we know that noble males, especially Royals, only rarely married below their station.

I think the system of primogeniture appears to be a significant factor. The older sons of the nobility inherited the bulk of power & property & married within their rank but the younger sons had a lower rank and their younger sons an even lower one. So although great wealth & high position may have remained within a relatively small number at the top of society who often intermarried, all those younger sons of younger sons could have produced a large proportion of today's population. My farmer Great Grandfather has several ancestral lines back through nobility to royalty & they all pass through younger sons or daughters. My other Great Grandparents might be similarly connected but further back so tracing the documentation is more challenging.

 

[Lee-Z]

Fascinating isn't it ? but i think it's difficult to project a statistic as is stated regarding the Charlemagne ages (around 800 AD western calender) to those of people from the middle ages. Some royals mentioned in this thread lived around 1500, but that is "only" about 500 years ago... Maximilian I or James I are still nearer to us in time than they are to Charlemagne.

I can trace my lineage through a couple of lines back for about 15-16 generations (about 1550-1570, let's say 450 years before now) and while persistently living in western europe (within about 50 kilometres from where i was born) there is still not a royal or noble in sight (not even a person who would have been on speaking terms with a royal..)
With 16 generations (and disregarding overlap in ancestors, which does occur), there would be about 65000 ancestors, but around 1550 there were a lot more people in western europe than 65000 (i think i read somewhere that in the netherlands, where "my" region currently resides, there were about 1.2 million people in 1550)

When you go back to Charlemagne so let's say 1200 years before now there is so much more time elapsed and the population was so much smaller then, that statistically i believe the facts mentioned about those ancestors....even though a small part of me still has a hard time picturing any kind of royal blood in my family line

I'd love to find out though and also earlier than that..for jnstance from which tribes i descend that quarrelled with Caesar, probably one of those that are mentioned in "De bello Gallico" as "never to be heard of again" (my ancestors probably just hid somewhere in forests until those noisy Romans had cleared off )

 

[Gawin]

In addition to primogeniture I think illegitimacy played a role. For example, Henry I of England had at least 23 known illegitimate children, whose descendants spread throughout England and northern France. James V of Scotland had nine known illegitimate children, one of whom was an ancestor of Princess Diana's maternal grandmother, Ruth Lady Fermoy, who was born into an upper middle class (not aristocratic) family.

And there were probably countless examples of unacknowledged or even unknown illegitimate children. For example, a knight with royal blood goes off to fight a war (Crusades, Hundred Years War, etc.), impregnates a local lowborn woman & never sees her again, but nine months later she gives birth to a child with royal DNA. Within a few generations the village is populated by that child's descendants, who pass it on to the neighboring countryside.

Despite her middle class background, the Duchess of Cambridge is a descendant of Edward IV (surprisingly enough through her working class ancestors who were coal miners in Yorkshire) and her American sister-in-law, the Duchess of Sussex, is a descendant of Edward III.

Several U.S. presidents were also descendants of Edward III: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and possibly Zachary Taylor and Jimmy Carter. James Madison was a descendant of Edward I and so is Barack Obama.

Many historians believe Thomas Jefferson fathered the children born to his slave, Sally Hemings. If true, those children (who were also born into slavery) inherited his royal DNA.

Gawin

 

[Pranter]

I thought it was proven thru DNA that Jefferson (or a male of his family, ie a son) fathered Sally Hemings children. Pretty sure I've seen documentaries about that one.


LaRae

 

[Gawin]

Yes, I've seen the documentary too, and read a book that proves the case, at least in my mind. But a few historians argue that Jefferson's nephews (who shared his DNA) fathered the children. Either way, they were still descendants of Edward III. I suspect a lot of slaves in the American South and the British Caribbean inherited royal English DNA in this way.

 

[Future_king]

You are quite right. It is fascinating. However, I feel the monarchs you have provided are a little recent, except Edward III. Philippe VI was of the Valois dynasty in France, and as such does not have many, if any, recorded descendants.
James I is a similar story. If you were to say, maybe, Robert the Bruce, that might be a little more accurate.

In any case, the Progenitor of all Irish people is undisputedly Niall Noígíallach, also known as Niall of the Nine Hostages. He is also the ancestor of most European Royal families.

Regardless, I'm glad you brought this up, because it is truly fascinating. No insult or rudeness intended, just constructive additions. Have a good day!

Niall of the nine hostages is actually also an patrineal ancestor to Matilda of Scotland, Queen of England, mother of Empress Maude

 

[Future_king]

Does anyone know if the royals are descended from Gwilym of the many conquests?

 

[Gawin]

Does anyone know if the royals are descended from Gwilym of the many conquests?

Gwilym of the Many Conquests is fictional.

 

[Future_king]

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