Bloodlines of US presidents

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BelovedAfeni
BelovedAfeni Members Posts: 8,647 ✭✭✭✭✭
edited March 2012 in The Social Lounge
Did you know all 43 U.S. presidents have carried European royal bloodlines into office? 34 have been genetic descendants from just one person, Charlemagne, the brutal eighth century King of the Franks. 19 of them directly descended from King Edward III of England. In fact, the presidential candidate with the most royal genes has won every single American election.

http://boards.ancestry.com.au/topics.royalty.links/212/mb.ashx

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  • Bully_Pulpit
    Bully_Pulpit Members Posts: 5,501 ✭✭✭✭✭
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    i was aware of this long ago but alot of ? cant put 2&2 together
  • fiat_money
    fiat_money Members Posts: 16,654 ✭✭✭✭✭
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    Most modern Caucasians of European ancestry are descendents of Charlemagne.
  • janklow
    janklow Members, Moderators Posts: 8,613 Regulator
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    fiat_money wrote: »
    Most modern Caucasians of European ancestry are descendents of Charlemagne.
    this right here. it's essentially a meaningless claim.

  • BelovedAfeni
    BelovedAfeni Members Posts: 8,647 ✭✭✭✭✭
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    was an interesting read
    nonetheless
  • Shizlansky
    Shizlansky Members Posts: 35,095 ✭✭✭✭✭
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    Interesting, read something bout this a while back didnt care then dont care now. But nonetheless its good to know that the president is basically picked in advanced and aint nothing we can do about it.


    hell my roots is probably trace back to Charlemagne being my folks get whiter the higher up the family tree I go.
  • Inglewood_B
    Inglewood_B Members Posts: 12,246 ✭✭✭✭✭
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    Interesting, read something bout this a while back didnt care then dont care now. But nonetheless its good to know that the president is basically picked in advanced and aint nothing we can do about it.


    hell my roots is probably trace back to Charlemagne being my folks get whiter the higher up the family tree I go.


    exactly why this thread is pointless

  • Alkindus
    Alkindus Members Posts: 1,677 ✭✭✭
    edited March 2012
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    Explain to me how it is possible to track your ancestry back to the 8th century? via DNA? I'm seriously wondering how this is possible?

    and how can one say that all europeans descend from charlemagne(plus didn't he roll fresh outta the pun 2 )? wasn't he just one dude living 1200 years ago? isn't that like saying everybody descends from eachother/we are all related?
  • BK Product
    BK Product Members Posts: 1,923 ✭✭✭✭✭
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    Alkindus wrote: »
    Explain to me how it is possible to track your ancestry back to the 8th century? via DNA? I'm seriously wondering how this is possible?

    and how can one say that all europeans descend from charlemagne(plus didn't he roll fresh outta the pun 2 )? wasn't he just one dude living 1200 years ago? isn't that like saying everybody descends from eachother/we are all related?

    id like some clarification as well....

  • janklow
    janklow Members, Moderators Posts: 8,613 Regulator
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    Alkindus wrote: »
    and how can one say that all europeans descend from charlemagne(plus didn't he roll fresh outta the pun 2 )? wasn't he just one dude living 1200 years ago? isn't that like saying everybody descends from eachother/we are all related?
    somewhat, yes. for example, We are all descended from Charlemagne:
    This bit of nonsense masks the value of the original hypothesis, which is almost certainly true: we are all descended from Charlemagne—at least, all of us with any European descent at all.

    It is difficult to trace the history of this assertion, though it is certainly similar to Horace Round’s exaggerated claim (around one hundred years ago) that he could trace any Englishman—of any social class—back to King Edward III.

    Mark Humphrys, a computer scientist in Dublin, has made a point of comparing various schemes to predict the recent common ancestors of all living people. His webpages on the ‘common ancestor’ question provide a fascinating survey of genealogical, genetic and statistical approaches.

    In 1999 Joseph Chang, a statistician at Yale University, wrote a mathematical formula to predict how far back we would have to go to find someone who was the ancestor of every person alive today. While his model was rather abstract (he assumed that ANY two people could have a child, not just a man and a woman), his conclusion was surprisingly short: we would only need to go back to about 1200 AD.

    More recently (2002 and 2003), a sophisticated model by MIT computer scientist Douglas Rohde has taken into account such factors as geographic isolation and non-random mate choice. Rohde’s model resulted in a more conservative but still surprisingly short estimate, that the most recent common ancestor of all living people lived as recently as 300 AD. A more sophisticated iteration of Rohde’s computer model is currently (2004) under construction and testing. These studies offer a thought-provoking counterpoint to the research into common male-line and female-line genetic inheritance (the ‘mitochondrial Eve’ and ‘DNA Adam’ phenomena) which predicts vastly greater time to common ancestors if one follows only the exclusively male or exclusive female lines of descent.

    As a medievalist, I am heartened that these scientists have been offering support for something that comes as a gut reaction to many genealogists who have traced premodern lines: everyone does seem to descend from Charlemagne. One website points out the obvious arithmetical issue: if we were to go back to Charlemagne, say 40 generations, we would have just over one trillion ancestors in that generation, far more than the number of people who have ever lived, let alone the number of people in the world then, which may have been about fifty million. This simplistic argument, despite its limitations, makes it easy to understand that the probability that someone like Charlemagne, who we know had descendants, is *not* our ancestor is essentially zero.

    But why Charlemagne? It is not without some reason that Charlemagne comes up so often as a symbolic ancestor—the “Father of Europe.” Living from 747 (or 748) to 814, he was the first Germanic king of the Middle Ages to reassemble a large portion of the defunct Western Roman Empire under his personal rule, which stretched into what is now Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Austria, and Germany. Aside from being named ‘Emperor’ (actually, ‘Augustus’) by a grateful Roman papacy in the year 800, he more importantly instituted many features of a successful medieval government, and spread that model throughout Western Europe, sowing the seeds for the development of several later nations. Yet his empire did not last beyond the civil wars between his grandsons, thirty years after his death in 814. One interesting point is that the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire through a combination of infighting and opportunistic invasions (by the Vikings, among others), actually insured that his own descendants spread throughout the European population: rather than remaining as a self-contained imperial aristocracy, his descendants were dispersed and then isolated from one another in the relative political vacuum of the tenth century. By this time they were spread everywhere in Western Europe and the British Isles. Subsequently their own descendants spread and married into Scandinavia and Slavic Europe, and finally to Greece and the Middle East during the Crusades.

    Of the various studies of Charlemagne’s descendants in print, one conservative and scholarly overview shows eight generations of descendants, down to the year 1000 (Karl Ferdinand Werner, “Die Nachkommen Karls des Grossen bis um das Jahre 1000,” in Karl der Grosse: Lebenswerk und Nachleben, Düsseldorf, 1965-68, 4:403-82). Charlemagne did not have as many immediate descendants (say, in three generations) as some medieval monarchs: but he is surely the earliest such figure for whom such a broad descendancy has been so thoroughly traced. If he is not what, in Rohde’s model, is identified as the ‘most recent common ancestor’ (that is, the first person, working backwards, who is the ancestor of all living individuals), by virtue of his position he may well serve as a proxy for such an individual, thus in a biological as well as political sense ‘the Father of Europe’.
  • janklow
    janklow Members, Moderators Posts: 8,613 Regulator
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    Young-Ice wrote: »
    Then how did Obama win?
    apparently he must have convinced an occasional white guy to vote for him

  • janklow
    janklow Members, Moderators Posts: 8,613 Regulator
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    Young-Ice wrote: »
    In fact, the presidential candidate with the most royal genes has won every single American election.
    well, don't overlook the presumably-descended-from-Charlemagne part of Obama's background. also, McCain probably doesn't have much left in the way of genes due to being an undead creature resurrected for the purposes of holding political office

  • Alkindus
    Alkindus Members Posts: 1,677 ✭✭✭
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    aye props on the info Jank
  • BelovedAfeni
    BelovedAfeni Members Posts: 8,647 ✭✭✭✭✭
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    cosign
    thanks jank
  • High Revolutionary
    High Revolutionary Members Posts: 3,729 ✭✭✭✭✭
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    I keep trying to tell y'all the presidential election is basically a WWE superfight.