Statement accuracy?

[raven]

I've just come across this and was curious as to what others thought.

Statistically, after 40-odd generations, virtually all people of European background
must be descendants of Charlemagne,

(from: http://www.ece.ualberta.ca/~cockburn/)

Charlemagne is a distant grandfather of mine, according to research (but if I take the DNA tests, who knows? ) and I figure that the chances are quite high for many people if they get back far enough because of course there are far more surviving records for the upper classes than the lower.

So perhaps the statement is accurate to the point that the nature of the surviving records will inevitably lead you back to Charlemagne?

 

[peter]

If you go back just 30 generations you'll have over a billion direct ancestors, which is more than the population of the world at that time - go back 40 generations and it's over a trillion, about 10 times the number of people who have ever lived.

In reality we don't have that many ancestors because of cousin marriages (and I'm not talking about 1st cousins); as a result you could be descended a million times from the same person.

Whether we are all descended from Charlemagne, or from Edward III, or from William the Conqueror is impossible for most of us to know - simply because relatively few records of ordinary people exist before the introduction of parish registers in 1538. But various statisticians have concluded that most of us probably are, simply on the basis that it's statistically unlikely that we aren't.

However, their calculations make various assumptions about the degree of mixing between different groups in the population which are hard to verify - so we may never really know the answer. What you can say is that the vast majority of people who are descended from any given mediaeval personage will never be able to prove it - DNA can only ever help for a very small minority.

In practice most people trace their heritage from an historical figure by finding a 'gateway ancestor' in their tree - someone whose genealogy is (in theory) well-researched. In practice a lot of the older genealogies have been questioned by later researchers - but ultimately we may never know.

 

[Bob Spiers]

Charlemagne is a distant grandfather of mine, according to research

Oh dear that reminds me of my days when subscribed to My Heritage (the memory still haunts) when such claims were commonplace. There seemed to be some sort of misguided braggadocio in being able to claim connections to remote historical figures of history and even the odd apocryphal connection back to Adam! (which of course if such figure existed would undoubtedly be true and I seem to recall that topic was aired in the Forum before).

I give Peter full marks for his reply which explains far better than I ever could that such claims may be statistically true for everyone, but individually are unlikely ever to be proven, DNA or otherwise.

 

[Bryman]

Surely any such claims based purely on statistics are rather pointless. As Peter explained so well, we are probably all related in some way with any notable figure that lived about 1-2,000 years ago, including all the latrine diggers/emptiers, etc. It doesn't really become meaningful unless the connection is close and relatively recent. Even then, we should be careful as to what we claim lest it puts us in a bad light for not living up to our potential.

Despite a multitude of agricultural labourers and similarly 'unskilled' workers amongst my ancestors, I am still interested to know where all legs of my family came from, what they did and where/how they lived. Ultimately, it is finding connections to previously unknown living 3rd and 4th cousins that spurs me on. Unfortunately, unless they too are members of the LC community, I am still unlikely to be able to make contact and communicate with them.

 

[Margery]

all legs of my family

Being the only child of an English couple who married in Australia, I have had little knowledge of my family. My Grandma was a shadowy figure who resided in the other side of the red post office letterbox. The lives of my parents' families seemed to be told in a collection of shadowy "snapshots" pasted in to an album. Imagine how I felt to discover, some years ago, that I had a second cousin, once removed (my mother and his grandmother were first cousins) living reasonably close by. Amazingly, we get on very well, with similar ideals and values. Our children and grandchildren seem to follow similar interests. We are pursuing our family history and have had great pleasure in sharing our discoveries. I would imagine that in the natural course of events, our paths would not have crossed.
I would hope that others will be able to make contact with their "other legs".

 

[SuzanneD]

There's a little more to the Charlemagne descent theory than straightforward statistical analysis: another factor is that high-status individuals tended to leave far more surviving descendants than average in these periods and so (given the multiplier effect over time) they are likely to be disproportionately represented in the gene pool. There's a piece of research published recently that demonstrates via DNA testing that a few known Asian rulers are heavily over-represented in the Y chromosomes of modern populations of those areas. The number of actual descendants of those rulers will be far far more than found in the study, as the study will not pick up any descendants via a female line at any point over the intervening centuries.