Fun but Rather Meaningless Genealogy

I think when someone new to genealogy envisions tracing their family's roots, they imagine discovering a famous cousin who will become their entrance into the world of the rich and famous or a royal ancestor making them 7th in line to the British throne - or something like that. Unfortunately, like with most things, that's not quite how it usually works.

If you are familiar with the concept of six degrees of seperation, this won't come as much of a surprise to you.  Odds are likely that you are in some way related to someone famous. However, it may not be a person you particularly want to be related to, or the distance of relationship will most likely be so great that it's basically meaningless, or some other fantasy-crushing reality. I'm the forty-eleventh cousin of President Obama and my 3rd cousin 2x removed is married to Reba McEntire's brother, Pake. True story. At a family reunion I told my relatives they were related to the former president and they asked me to stop doing genealogy.

Ready for another blow to your ego?  There's a really good possibility you might be genealogically related to royalty but not genetically, and you certainly aren't alone.  Most people, if they search long enough and go back far enough in all of their various lines, can eventually find some ancestor who was descended from some royal (most likely Charlemagne).

Confused? Here's a great blog post explaining how if you go just 40 generations back, you have over two trillion ancestors!  You may have noticed a problem. The problem being that there haven't been two trillion people alive in the history of the world.  As the blog states, you do not have two trillion unique ancestors - there's repetition. The blog also explains how using autosomal DNA is really only significant up to 5 generations back.  By seven generations back, you share less than one percent of DNA with a particular ancestor. Thus how you can be not genetically related to your ancestors.

All that being said, it's still fun knowing that King Edward I is my 25 x great-grandfather.  I'm a princess! How did I figure this out? There is a searchable book on Ancestry called The Royal Descents of 600 Immigrants by Gary Boyd Roberts.  I discovered one of my ancestors in it - Captain Charles Barham of Virginia. Here's the lineage:

Me

My mom

My grandma

John Gates (born 1887)

Mollie Justice (1861)

Sarah Robinson (1844)

John B. Robinson (1810)

Sarah "Sally" Barham (1786)

James Barham Jr. (1764)

James Barham Sr. (1730)

Charles Barham (1706)

Robert Barham (1678)

Captain Charles Barham (1626)

Here's how Captain Charles connects to King Edward...

What's really great is that this book gives sources.  So the lineage can be verified.  Although I have to say, it seems most of the time these Brits are pretty good about genealogy when it comes to royalty and aristocracy. They don't usually make mistakes.

Another interesting thing here is that if you stumble upon a book about the Magna Carta and the signers of it (called sureties) and their descendants, you would recognize some names. De Clare, Despencer, FitzAlan, Sergeaux.  This further illustrates why you don't have as many ancestors as you should - intermarriage.  I've identified no less than 8 signers of the Magna Carta that I'm descended from because of all the intermarriage. (It's not that rare. There's even a few lineage societies of people descended from the Barons who signed it. BOMC and National Society of Magna Carta Dames and Barons to name a couple.)

Plus, turns out the daughter of my 26 x great-grandmother, Isabel de Clare (sister to my 25 x great-grandfather, Richard de Clare) married Robert V de Brus and became the grandmother to Robert the Bruce! So there you go, now I'm a cousin *cough*sort of*cough* to the Scottish throne.

My next post is going to be about the illustrious Barhams from as far back as the earliest written records in England.