Richard III - my 20 x great-grandparent
 

Listening to the radio today, a statistician did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to estimate the number of living people who could be connected genealogically to the king in the car park.

Richard had plenty of nephews and nieces. Assuming they each had two surviving children who each went on to have two children and a generation is 25 years (so 20 generations), you end up with a figure of 1,000,000 people descended from Richard III's nieces and nephews. This is assuming there is no inter-marrying, of course.

If the medieval average of 2.3 children is assumed, then there are 17,000,000 people living today who are genealogically linked to Richard III.

A pretty silly assumption! I read an article debunking this kind of thing recently, I wonder whether I can find it...

I read somewhere (dunno where now, can't remember!) that ON AVERAGE, the male line fails after six generations, which would make actually proving you are descended from R3 quite difficult.

At a distance of 20 generations, we each have about 1 million ancestors (assuming no doubling up) so R£'s genes have become somewhat diluted by the time they reach his 20 x descendants.

OC

I think the article I read must have been in a family history magazine, and not available online, but the point was that family trees actually include a very high proportion of intermarrying, and that if you go far back, people didn't move around from place to place so much, so all or nearly all of their ancestors would come from the same place where they lived. So they would not have many more ancestors in a particular generation than the actual number of people who were living around there at that time. (With the same applying going forwards from those ancestors to the number of descendants of any particular person.)


Of course royalty moved around but their descendants would have intermarried with a small group of families in the higher social strata.

Kite

That's certainly the case in my tree. My GGM from Gawsworth in Cheshire came from a family which had been in the village since before church records began and had intermarried with the other families in the village for nearly 400 years. She accounts for one-eighth of my genes and DNA of course, but at every generation backwards someone married a cousin or at least a blood relative of some sort.

Half my genes and DNA come from Scotland and I doubt has much to do with R3. They too intermarried.

In fact it is only in the last two or three generations that anyone in my tree appears to marry a completely random stranger. Even when they moved away from close family, they moved to be with more distant kin and married there.

The idea that everyone's genes are spread out evenly across the generations is a nice one but totally false as far as I can see.

OC

I think the eight fingers per hand and the third arm were a bit of a clue though OC without you going through the pain and angst of researching it all :d:d

*Slaps Glen*.

Makes a nonsense of all that business about inbreeding being a bad thing though. If the genes are good, you generally get good genes. Animal breeders have known this for many centuries.

On the other side of the coin though - if the OP is correct, then equally Osric the gooseboy, Greasy Joan and Will the blacksmith also have over one million descendants living today......

I'm busy with a little sketch tree at the mo, starting with a couple born in the 1780s. They had a least 11 children. 5 survived to adulthood and had 8 children between them. By 1923 there isn't a single person left on this line, it has completely died out. So, there's at least one line which MAY have been descended from R3, who knows, but has long gone. The same must apply in every generation - just because you are born doesn't mean you will leave descendants!

OC

Shall we send a briefing note to Radio 4's More of Less programme to put them right?

Shona

I don't think there's much point, do you? There seems to be a widely accepted belief that statistics and averages prove facts. Everyone loves the idea of being descended from R3, no one wants to be descended from Greasy Joan!

OC

I have a few lines that stop as there are no descendants,
I also have a few where a hubby/wife dies and the surviving spouse (a cousin) then goes on to marry a sibling of the deceased, children born to both marriages then marry cousins, for a genration or two it's not a massive gene pool that's for sure.

I personally nearly ran into what would have been a nightmare, as a teenager I had a relationship with someone I very recently discovered to be a half sibling, of course we never knew at the time, it only came to light a few months ago when one of my old posts was discovered.