Keep going! I was able to go back 62 generations, to the days of the Roman Empire. What I find interesting is how history is family history. It makes the textbooks not about some random names in distant lands, but about my family. I am using this as a tool to help the kids understand that what they are reading is really about them, so they might take a bit more of an interest and do well in school.

Of course, mathematically speaking, most everyone of western European descent is likely from Charlemagne, Merovech, and Dogobert or such. Compare number of ancestors per generation to historical population of Europe and one will find the ancestors exceeding the population (35 generations is more than enough), meaning there are a lot of nth cousin marriages since then.

The big deal is not that we are descended from royalty, but that we can find the connection at all to distant historical people and events a thousand or more years ago, thereby making that personal connection with the history that eventually brought us to today. For the ten or fifteen notables in a distant generation we know about, there may be a hundred million that are forever lost to history, with only their whispers to reside in our DNA

When I first linked into the royals, I told my family, “I have bad news and good news about our family” The bad news is that we are not so much English like we thought, as we are French. The good news is that we used to own France.

Gives a rather new perspective when touring castles.

My remarks has however, everything to do with the, in my eyes, denigrating remarks of len.langan (Qoute: The negative thoughts come mostly from the United States and they have no idea on anything concerned with History or Tradition becuase they have none of their own. One can only feel sorry for them)

I am not from the United States, but I think such remarks are snobbish. We are what we are in our own rights and no one has the right to put others down like he/she did in his/her remarks.

No we aren’t all famous, and I’m sure nobody on this site has ever heard of me, but most everybody can say they know who President Obama, Justin Bieber, Jennifer Lopez are, so despite the fact that we are all created equal, some people are just better known.

The few very wealthy people that I’ve known in life, couldn’t get me to trade places with them for all of the money in the world. Although they could buy anything they want and they have numerous (so called friends) I wouldn’t trade places with them, because they aren’t happy people. They go through life missing so much.

I’ve actually found just as much pride in doing DNA ancestry testing at DNA Tribes, because much of the information about my origins were missing, as well as for two of the daughter’s we adopted. DNA Tribes test both paternal and maternal lineage. I found out that my past is much more colorful than just German, English and Irish. My biggest genetic link was Finland. There has been no information past down that includes this information plus so much more. It isn’t important that we have kings and queens in our ancestry, but that we find pride in our past ancestry and who we are.

Jennifer Pelot Rysewyk is a lucky girl to have followed her ancestry back so far, and it will make a wonderful story to her children, grand children and great grand children one day.

But as to your remark about the importance of history and tradition in the sense of so-called royalty, why should their life be so much more important? Why should a select group of individuals have such a special life, achieved wealth and possessions over the backs of, and with the blood and sweat of the rest of the inhabitants of a country?

The phenomenon of Kings, Queens and so-called royalty should have been all behind us in this day and age we are living in. Those things should only exist in history books and fairy tales.

All people are created equal and no one should be placed over others, just because you are born in, or get married into a certain family. William and Kate’s wedding should be just the wedding of any other young couple in the UK, and nothing more then that.

The humongous bills to celebrate the wedding are, after all paid with taxpayers money, while so many people in that country (and the rest of the world for that matter) do not have enough to live a decent life.

And as for the remark that people from the United States have no idea on anything concerned with history or tradition because they have none of their own, it is a very stupid remark, because every individual and every civilization has its own history and tradition, no matter where it started.

The history and traditions of the United states started in the USA and on other continents and it all came together on the continent of the USA, and that is THEIR history and THEIR tradition; there is nothing to feel sorry for.