A large number of people who can trace at least one line back to early colonial days are also related to many of the same royals, and almost all of the royal families of Europe were related. The Europeans in the early days of the American colony were kind of inbred.

Basically, if you find you're related to one of them, you probably related to all of them somehow. It's still fun to trace it back. Geni.com and Ancestry both let you refer to other people's research (if they made it public), so you don't usually have to do all the work yourself. And it can mostly be done on the computer nowadays, instead of trudging around cemeteries, looking for old headstones, lol.

Geneticist Adam Rutherford pointed out that family trees grow backwards exponentially, so the amount of ancestors people should have from the ninth century is larger than the amount of people who were alive during the ninth century. That means anyone with European ancestry is related to King Charlemagne.

https://gizmodo.com/dont-get-too-excited-if-a-dna-test-says-you-have-ancien-1706754078

he left france in 1789 (just ahead of the guilletine) to help found gallipolis, ohio and to fight with andrew jackson at new orleans. he was an aristocrat but i can't find royalty in his background.

a geneology search is a fun way to spend a recovery from an illness or other down time in your life. there are many interesting facts in everyone's family,

So hi cousin

but I've learned that I am directly related to the manservant who got to wipe up the boot prints the Tsar of Russia left when he tromped around in muddy boots. So there.

I've seen family trees that suggest I am descended from royalty. Considering the state of record keeping in the past, and that so many family trees are embellished, I don't buy it. My own grandmother was guilty of bias toward records that made her lineage look more high faluting than it was, despite major issues with the records she favored. The last I checked, my paternal haplogroup was I1a

So "you share a male-line ancestor with Louis XVI" and "you share a female-line ancestor with Marie Antoinette" don't really mean much.


With AncestryDNA and GEDmatch I was able to verify that I have shared ancestors with Harry Truman, though? Which is a lot more recent (and I actually know their names).

So I obviously did it mostly the old way (letters, libraries, courthouses, cemeteries, etc.)

Another poster said that the early settlers in "The Colonies" were related to royalty. The cause was the law where the first born male received all. The second and other sons were expected to go make their own fortunes. The New World was that opportunity.

Long way of saying that my research found the one that got me one step from the throne. Prince John, Duke of Lancaster, son of King ****** don't remember right now. I'm on my tablet and my genealogy program is on the desktop at the other end of the house and I'm temporarily bed-bound due to back issue. I think it was one of the Edwards.

Ultimately, my line goes through the Plantagenets and Tudors, ending with King Henry vii (but not the more famous King Henry viii). Not really that special. If you can find the documentation back that far, it was more likely records were kept on royalty. I've used Burke's Dormant and Extinct Peerages for some family lineages. It is sorted by surname and it's available on-line. I've also used Wikipedia for narrative about the more well-known individuals.

It's a great hobby -- history, people, events. Not at all like taking a history course in school.

When i first came across the Scottish royal lineage on a DNA cousin's tree on Ancestry, I was skeptical until I read the historical research compiled by Adrian Benjamin Burke and published in the Genealogist magazine in 2013 and by the NY Genealogical Society. Burke and other researchers and historians spent 5 years tracing the ancestral records both in NY and Scotland of the lineage of the Duncanson sisters who emigrated to New Netherlands in 1600's. I am descended from Mary Duncanson and Pieter Loockermans who settled in NY.

Not royal but DNA evidence shows that I am related to Otzi the Iceman since my mother shares his K maternal haplotype and my father has the same paternal Y DNA G haplotype as Otzi. Makes sense since Otzi was found in Alps near border of Italy and Austria. My mother was Italian and my father's Y DNA haplotype is most commonly found in Austrian men.

I'm the 43 Great Granddaughter of the Kings of Denmark and Norway, but it hasn't been confirmed by DNA yet.

The average MRCA (most recent common ancestor) of any haplogroup, maternal or paternal, is 9500 years.

This means that in 7,500 B.C., a caveman and cavewoman had a cavebaby who had a mutation in Y DNA or mtDNA that became the founder effect for a new haplogroup that went on, over the course of 40,000 generations to eventually produce you and, on a totally separate pedigree, one of the royals. Any remnant of this shared ancestor DNA-wise would be less than 1cm or 0.0000001%. The odds that you and the royal inherited that same fraction of DNA is that number squared by itself, or 0.0000001% of 0.0000001% and even if you did, 1cm is not enough to even register as a match on any autosomal site because everybody has 1cm that matches everyone else just based on randomness.

It’s a cute marketing ploy by the DNA sites but meaningless as to “related to” a royal. It means you are 40,000th cousins many times removed just as everyone is to everyone else.

King of the English from 978 to 1013 and again from 1014 until his death in 1016

Hilarious paintings of him survive.

And then there's Lady Godiva--not royalty, but a lot of fun to have as 64th grandmother.

who married Walter, the 6th High Stewart of Scotland. Their son later became King Robert II of Scotland. So, Robert (I) The Bruce was an in-law.

If I go back far enough, William (the Bastard) the Conqueror was a Grandfather-in-law (1066). Our family in Normandy ended up going north to England. While William was kicking out the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, he sent our family (read: cronies) up to run Scotland. Our family later became the "Stewart" line. (see above)

Back in Medieval Europe while in "France", the Franc Empire, there were lots of kings I'm related to, a "king" being a local ruler of the city-states following the fall of the Western Roman empire. LOTS more research needed on that era for me... It's hazy, but damned interesting.

So, first we were Francs, then Normans, then Scottish, then in 1623 became "American".

Funny journey!!

-g

ps: Mary, Queen of Scots, was a 5th cousin (Stewart line). Damn you Queen Elizabeth I... but we got our revenge. King James VI of Scotland (Mary's child) became King James I of England. Hah Hah!!!