Sgt. George asked a question, "How about it John, do all us descendants of Anna [Barbara Shöne] really have ties to English/French 'royalty'? I'm still trying to figure out the logistics of how one of Geoffrey's descendants got from western France to southern Germany and became a SCHÖNE ancestor."
Since I had not written today’s column and since I am going to a Palatine-to-America meeting today (Pennsylvania Chapter, meeting in New Holland), I will try to put some thoughts together in response to George’s question.
Yes, the descendants of Anna Barbara Schöne probably do have ties to English and French royalty, and royalty in just about every country of Europe.
I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on back. Allow three generations per century and let’s go back to Charlemagne (Carl der Gross) at about 800 AD. That is twelve centuries prior to us, so twelve times three is 36 generations. That makes 68,719,000,000 ancestors that would be on my chart in 800 AD. That is almost 69 billion. How many people lived in Europe then? Perhaps ten million. So on the average, each person living in the year 800 AD is on my ancestor’s chart 69,000 times!
What is the diffusion from the so-called royalty to the general population? Pretty high. Not all of the King’s children could ascend to the throne and they had to find their way in the general population. Eventually, Charlemagne’s genes have worked their way into a very large percentage of today’s population. This is not even considering the illegitimate births, which probably were higher for royal sires than for the general population.
I don’t get very excited about anyone who claims descent from a given person of centuries ago. There is probably nothing unique about it, i.e., it does not put them into a special class.
If someone claims to have a proven line of descent, I must smile a bit and humor them in their delusions. Suppose that someone claims a line for 36 generations. The probably of being true at each generation is certainly less than 0.98 on the average. Therefore, the probability that the entire sequence of 36 steps is true is less than one-half.
Why claim any descent from royalty? There is nothing unique about such a claim as we probably all are descendants. As to whether any particular claim is true is very iffy if the sequence is more than ten in length. I just smile at people who make these claims. I smile even more at the people who try and manufacturer the evidence as George’s friend seems to have done.
(27 Sep 03)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.