Are you related to royalty?

 

Over the years, there has been a constant undercurrent in the genealogical community about ancestral connections to royalty. This is one of the major incentives for some people to become involved in genealogy. It has also been the incentive for the establishment of many add-on businesses taking advantage of the interest. Additionally, there are common published articles that make claims that "practically everyone" with British ancestry could be descended from royalty. The operative words here are "could be" and "practically." Of course, there are no studies or actual statistics cited to support these claims especially when the claims are made by commercial enterprises who want to sell you something. 

It has not been too long ago that pedigrees back to Adam were sold in bookstores so you could get your ancestry done without any research at all. 

My most common reaction to this supposition is that sure, the royal families had children just like the rest of your ancestors, but my main objection is that tracing an ancestral line back to a specific king or queen makes a lot of shaky assumptions. However, studies have shown that everyone on earth is related to everyone else and if you take this far enough, we are all related to royalty at some level. See The Guardian. 2018. “Are You Descended from Royalty? Six Things to Consider,” October 11, 2018, sec. What’s in your blood? https://www.theguardian.com/whats-in-your-blood-/2018/oct/11/royal-ancestry-genetics-things-to-consider. 

If being related to royalty, a famous person, or an ancestor that fought in a war helps you to find out about and discover your ancestors then I am entirely in favor of whatever it takes. But I don't really have much interest in anyone who sells pedigrees. If someone advertises that the goal of doing your research is a connection with royalty, that is not always demonstrably possible. Regardless of the fact that everyone is related to everyone, from my own personal experience, many pedigree lines are undocumented past the 1700s and never will be. 

If you are really interested in discovering your ancestry, you should also be aware that the search may turn up some relatives you may wish had not been discovered. But as my grandmother used to say, you can choose your friends, but you can't choose your relatives. 

You also must also remember that ancestors accumulate exponentially: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc. and this does not include multiple marriages of the same people. It is highly speculative, but current guesses at the total number of people who have ever lived on the earth is about 117 billion. That number is exceeded after 36 generations. A generation is usually considered to be 20 to 30 years. So, given the exponential increase, there is a point at which everyone on the earth at some point in time is related to you now. If the exponential doubling is continued for 26 generations or iterations, then the number of people would equal more than all the people who have lived on the earth: 2 doubled 36 times is 68,719,476,735 and one more doubling and the total number of people who ever lived would be exceeded. 

These numbers also illustrate the fact that you will never "finish" or "complete" your genealogy until you have all 7.98 billion people now living on the earth in your family tree.