Richard III - my 20 x great-grandparent - Genealogists' Forum

Shona · #1 10-05-13, 20:14

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.

kiterunner · #2 10-05-13, 21:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shona

This is assuming there is no inter-marrying, of course.

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

Michael · #3 12-05-13, 18:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by kiterunner

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

I certainly wouldn't be able to find it now, but I remember reading an article which mentioned that almost every line of Prince Charles's ancestry had been traced back 20 generations or so, and compared the theoretical number of ancestors at that point (assuming doubling every generation) with the actual number of distinct individuals. I can't remember the exact numbers, but the number of different ancestors at that generation was MUCH smaller - I think only something like 1/20 of the number with no intermarrying. If we estimate that over the course of 500 years, intermarriages reduce the total number of descendants by a factor of 20 or so, the radio statistician's estimate of 1,000,000 becomes a more believable 50,000.

To illustrate OC's point, there's a certain fairly well known individual who lived a century or so after Richard III and has no living descendants. He had three children and four grandchildren, but only one of the grandchildren lived long enough to marry, and she bore no children so his bloodline ended with her death, only 54 years after his own.

Olde Crone · #4 10-05-13, 21:53

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

kiterunner · #5 10-05-13, 22:32

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.

Olde Crone · #6 10-05-13, 22:59

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

Glen TK · #7 11-05-13, 02:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by Olde Crone

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

Olde Crone · #8 11-05-13, 10:05

*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

Shona · #9 11-05-13, 14:37

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

Phoenix · #10 12-05-13, 10:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shona

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

I would love to know what proper statisticians came up with. I used to read the population studies papers: age at marriage, family size etc which were fascinating, but did indicate how very grey the stats get pre decent recording.

Even if all the premises were solid, I do find the 25 year generation decidedly suspect. The actual nobility and royalty may well have been taking teenage brides, but ordinary people wouldn't be marrying until they could afford to. With one of my ancestors having children in his seventies, that really skews the figures.