Tips & Opinions

We are all royal!

Over the past few days my email has been clogged with questions about whether or not anyone- everyone was related to royalty.   Well being the geek that I am, I decided to a quick bit of research and here’s what I found out  (these are excerpted for the articles noted at the end of this posting… feel free to read them in their entirety).

[A] 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.- Dick Eastman

…everyone of European descent has royal ancestry. – Steve Olsen

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. – Steve Olsen

The original articles may be found here:

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Genealogy of Royal Families

ManyRoads Creator, Professional Genealogist, Family Historian, ManyRoads Podcast co-host, Old Guy and most importantly 'opa'