Every time I think about finding kings and queens in the family
tree, I create a mental image of the would-be social climbers of years ago who
researched family trees in hopes of proving themselves to be "better"
than the average person. How little they knew. It seems that the "average
person" also has royal ancestry. In fact, there is nothing more common
than having a few bluebloods in the family tree.
Lisa Oberg and George Anderson both sent e-mails this week telling
me about a fascinating article in the May 2002 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
That issue contains an article by Steve Olson, called "The Royal We: The
mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended
from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended
from Muhammad and Charlemagne."
In the article, Olsen describes his own search for his Irish ancestors.
He goes on to detail what he learned from Mark Humphrys, a computer scientist
at Dublin City University, as well as from some recent research done by Joseph
Chang, a statistician at Yale University. In short, everyone of European descent
has royal ancestry.
Chang’s mathematical model makes the case for the number
of ancestors that each of us has: "The mathematics of our ancestry is exceedingly
complex, because the number of our ancestors increases exponentially, not linearly.
These numbers are manageable in the first few generations—two parents,
four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents—but
they quickly spiral out of control. Go back forty generations, or about a thousand
years, and each of us theoretically has more than a trillion direct ancestors—a
figure that far exceeds the total number of human beings who have ever lived."
The article goes on at some length to explain the realities of
migration patterns and intermarriage within small communities. Olsen writes,
"The number of ancestors common to all Europeans today increased, until,
about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation prevailed: 20 percent of the
adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living
today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died
childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor
of every European living today."
Another preconceived idea that needs to be shattered is that royalty
only married royalty, and therefore, commoners would not likely have royal blood
in their veins. Humphrys says, "Here we have a sir, so this woman is the
daughter of a knight. Maybe this woman will marry nobility, but there's a limited
pool of nobility, so eventually someone here is going to marry someone who's
just wealthy. Then one of their children could marry someone who doesn't have
that much money. In ten generations you can easily get from princess to peasant."
Steve Olson’s article in The Atlantic is very interesting,
and I would suggest that every genealogist read it in its entirety at: www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/05/olson.htm.
Professor Joseph Chang's paper is a bit more difficult for non-mathematicians
to read. It is available at: www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/pubs/Ancestors.pdf.
The best quote of all came from Mark Humphrys: "You can ask
whether everyone in the Western world is descended from Charlemagne, and the
answer is yes, we're all descended from Charlemagne. But can you prove it? That's
the game of genealogy."
Dick Eastman Online
