As an excellent article at Scientific American points out (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-all-more-closely-related-than-we-commonly-think), tracing down to the present time from royality opens the floodgates to royal descent. By that I mean that having royal ancestry is a certainty. Thus everyone of recent European descent, as the article points out, is quite literally descended from the emperor Charlemagne (748-814 AD). This conclusion is the result of simple mathematics paired with a bit of modeling. But to put it even more simply, if Charlemagne was (say) 39 generations before you, that’s the generation in which you have about 550 billion ancestors (i.e, you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, etc., with the numbers doubling each generation). Charlemagne has to be tucked in there somewhere.
Crowning of Charlemagne
In fact he’s in there many times over, with redundancy accounting for the fact that 550 billion ancestors were many times Earth’s population at the time. That is the floodgate; the article points out that anyone alive as late as 1000 AD is either the ancestor of everyone, or of no one, among people of recent European descent. Lines do die out with no living descendants (gate closed), but if someone from 1000 AD or earlier has any descendants he or she has everyone as descendants! (gate wide open).
Why do we bother tracing royal ancestry, then? This is the matter of the gateway, an ancestor who has provable ancestry from royalty. Gateways, unfortunately, are harder to find than by scratching numbers on paper. Yet they’re also part of the fun of tracing ancestry. Like Forrest Gump, you never know what you’re going to get. But it’s likely that eventually, some unsuspected line in your ever-doubling roster of ancestors is going to lead to a royal descent. It’s one thing to know you must be a descendant of Charlemagne, but it’s another to experience the pleasure of tracing a specific provable descent from him.
My close relatives are lucky to have as many as seven gateway immigrant ancestors, depending on which exact lines they share. Each immigrant was born in Europe and came to America. Although fuller descriptions are available in blog articles “#29. Seven Gateway Ancestors to Royalty” and “#43. The Maternal Ancestry of George Yate of Maryland (d. 1691)”, I’ll close with a brief synopsis. If you have difficulty finding either article, just drill to the bottom of the page and perform a search for its title. Happy researching!
The Gateway Ancestors
1. Dugal McQueen (abt 1666?-1746); descended from the Scottish Kings James II back through Robert I, “the Bruce”, and many earlier lines.
2. Ralph Lewis (abt 1649-1712), a descendant of the Kings of Castile and Leon in Spain, King Edward III of England, and their many royal ancestors.
3. Mary Need (1645-aft 1708), wife of Edmund Cartlidge. Descended from the Lords Clifford, and King Edward III of England.
4. Elizabeth Gerard (1630-1716), wife of Robert Ellyson as her first husband. Descended from King Edward I of England, and many other royal figures.
5. Susanna Gerard (abt 1632-1677), her sister, who married Robert Slye as her first husband.
6. George Yate (abt 1643?-1691), a “double gateway” in that his father descended from King Henry III of England, and his mother from King Edward III.
7. Lawrence Dameron (1615-1660), descended from King Henry I of France.
These and many other intermarried families, are covered in the new 4th edition of The Omnibus Ancestry: 785 Documented American and European Lines (2020). The book is available through this link to Lulu.com.
Picture credit:
“Crowning of Charlemagne, Detail” by edlimphoto is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
The Genealogist's Craft 