Richard III - my 20 x great-grandparent

[Shona]

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.