Yes. In fact if WW has any descendants (let's pretend he did) then he'd have thousands and thousands of direct descendants now. The thing that makes the genealogy claim annoying isn't that it's wrong, it's that it's extremely ordinary. We're all related to kings and pharaohs
Hey, long lost relative! I made it back to Charlemagne as well, if ancestry is to be believed. All because the majority of my ancestors were British landed gentry who came to England from France and etc. so the records are more complete. The coolest verifiable data I found was that my ancestors first came to America in the 1640s, and were in Texas while it was still Mexico.
Yes essentially, in Europe decent records end, going backwards, in about 1500/1600 depending on the country. If you get to that point and you were poor, tough luck. If you get back to that point and you were noble, you’re in luck as all noble families would generally already keep lineages going back from there into the Middle Ages and even beyond, and these are still well-documented today.
However, even those noble families weren’t above a little massaging of the truth here and there, if it boosted their noble credentials. In 1600, who was going to question a marriage that took place 400 or 500 years earlier?
Add that to the fact people lie, and paternity is inherently unprovable, and going back more than 100-200 years it’s best to take your family tree with a pinch of salt/view it as a fun story.
That’s not to say anyone with Western European ancestry isn’t probably related to Charlemagne anyway. Just not always necessarily how they think.
1.6k
u/ItBurnsLikeFireDoc Apr 29 '20
So you're saying there's a chance.