Editor's Note: This article is one of two sidebars to "Give Your Pedigree the Royal Treatment: Researching Noble Lines" by Eugene A. Stratton, FASG. See also "Millennium Queens."

Most families are ordinary, not special, and ethnic intermarriage, intergenerational conflict, and "running away from home" are certainly as American as the rural or small-town arcadias of Norman Rockwell and Grandma Moses. Beside these bittersweet facts, however, is the grand revelation that probably sixty percent or more of the American people are descended from kings.

This descent is usually derived through roughly 350 royally descended immigrants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Royal descent occurs, of course, because the younger children of kings become or marry nobles; the younger children of nobles become or marry landed gentry; the younger children of landed gentry become bureaucrats or professionals; and the younger children of professional elites have become middle-class citizens of the Anglo-American and British-derived world.

Most middle-class Americans and many middle-class Europeans descend from a cluster of High Medieval kings—Plantagenets from England, Capetians from France, and Hohenstaufens from Germany. And because of various intermarriages with the families of Byzantine emperors, a large number of westerners can also trace kinship to the Safavid shahs of Persia and various Mughal princes of India.

In addition to the royal descents of perhaps 150 million or more Americans, probably 30 million are distantly related (eighth to twelfth cousins) to the late Diana, Princess of Wales and her sons, Princes William and Henry, mostly through about twenty to twenty-five New England immigrant forebears of Joseph Strong (b. Coventry, CN 1770). Strong is the New England-derived fourth-great-grandfather of the late princess, who is 1/8th American and 1/64th New England Yankee. (She is also 1/64th Armenian.) The remainder of her American ancestry is mid-Atlantic, from New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Maryland.

When this New England and mid-Atlantic ancestry of the late Princess of Wales is added to the Virginia forebears of Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mother, the young heirs to the British throne are found to have ancestry in the three major geographic areas of colonial America (New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the South), and may thus be considered the genealogical center of the Anglo-American world. The Queen Mother’s Virginia ancestry also connects them to George Washington, Meriwether Lewis, and Robert E. Lee among other "heroes," and via Diana’s New England forebears there are connections to at least two Canadian prime ministers—Sir Robert Laird Borden and Viscount Bennett. The Queen Mother and the late Princess of Wales also add to the modern British "royal stock" a large quantity of English noble ancestry ("the Whig oligarchy").

Prince Philip and King George VI, husband and father, respectively, of the current queen, descend almost exclusively from the Protestant caste of nineteenth-century European princes, centered in Germany. The late Queen Mary, mother of George VI, was partly of noble Hungarian ancestry, however, and was descended from a sister of Vlad Dracul (the monster "Count Dracula"). Also, Prince Philip is the matrilineal great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria; the murdered czarina of Russia was his great-aunt; and his mitochondrial DNA was used to disprove the identity of Anna Andersen as Grand Duchess Anastasia.

Early in life, Prince Philip renounced his claims to the thrones of Greece and Denmark; Greece has ceased to be a monarchy, and Denmark no longer follows male-only succession. If these circumstances were different, William and Harry might be princes of three European kingdoms.

There is indeed much to say about the spread of royal descents among European-derived nations. Such thousand-year lineages take us far beyond the confines of childhood, neighbors, community, and nation and connect us with much of the splendor and some of the triumphs and catastrophes of Western history overall.

Roberts, Gary Boyd. The Royal Descents of 500 Immigrants. GPC, 1993. (2nd edition scheduled for 2002)

Stone, Don C. Ancient and Medieval Descents Project, ongoing. Philadelphia.

Roberts, Gary Boyd. . Vol. 1. Carl Boyer, 3rd. 1998. Chapters 1-5 especially.

Roberts, Gary Boyd and William Addams Reitwiesner. American Ancestors and Cousins of The Princess of Wales. GPC, 1984.

Paget, Gerald. The Lineage and Ancestry of H.R.H. Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Vol. 2. 1977.