thePeerage.com

[dg1333]

By what generation is most everyone in England cousin to the queen? In the USA when will everyone be related to George Washington? I think by the 20th generation in England and it will take 12 more generations in the USA.

[Pg de Loriol]

interesting one this! Horace Round, a genealogist of the early 20th century, said that evryone descends from royalty but it is very hard for most English families to go beyond the 18th Century for a proveable pedigree. Therefore, no, there are relatively few families that can prove to be related to the Queen, say up to 10th cousin, and even that does not mean you have Royal blood!

[dg1333]

Interesting you mentioned 10th cousin. I am an American 10th cousin to the Queen and can prove it through Col George Reade. Unfortunately, the royal blood was outlawed in 1776. I have 10 ancestors who fought in the American Revolution on the "american" side.
Thanks for answering my question. Americans hold England in VERY HIGH regard these days for obvious reasons.

[col48]

You can't outlaw the blood - only the people in whose arteries it flows!

Somewhere I've read that anyone who becomes a US Citizen has to renounce all foreign titles or the claim thereto but there is no law which requires someone who is already a US Citizen (by birth, presumably) from inheriting a title from a foreign relation.

Found it! Copied from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jennings_Capell

(viewed on 19 December 2011)
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William Jennings Capell (born 9 August 1952), a retired grocery clerk from Yuba City, California, is the heir presumptive to the Earldom of Essex. He will be the 12th Earl if the current earl, Paul Capell, 11th Earl of Essex (currently 66 and unmarried), dies without legitimate male issue. He had considered renouncing the earldom if it would require him to give up his United States citizenship. (Under the United Kingdom's Peerage Act 1963, a person may disclaim a hereditary peerage.) United States law requires only government officeholders without Congressional authorization and persons wishing to become naturalized citizens, however, to renounce titles of nobility. As Mr. Capell is in neither category, there would be no legal impediment to his use of the title as a U.S. citizen.
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[dg1333]

Thanks for your comment. All very interesting!

[col48]

You'd probably need to have a careful definition of 'related to' to have a question which could be grappled with - after all, the experts say the whole human race is descended from a small number of individuals (or, if you take Genesis literally, a [i]very[/i] small number) so we're all related anyway.

Britain..

You'd also have to make some adjustment for post-1950 immigration, which has brought in millions of people whose ancestral relationships to the rest of us must in general be untraceably distant.

Consider the question of how many British (ie English, Scottish and Welsh) people whose great-grandparents were all born in Britain have a shared ancestor with the Queen (whose great-grandparents were not all born in Britain).

Each person has two parents, four grandparents and so on. Sounds simple, but sometimes cousins marry. Indeed, people tend to marry other people from their own geographical or social area - something which was as good as a rule until the late 19th Century. Royal princes were expected to make good dynastic alliances, the children of the nobility tried to do the same, the rural poor - almost everyone else before about 1800 - were restricted by how far they could walk to marrying people from their village or neighbouring ones. Crossing the social divide would not be usual (except for taking a mistress...) Over time, whichever group you belonged to, you'd almost certainly be marrying a relative - but a relative from within the 'tribe'.

Bit of maths here. Assume the 1-2-4 but after that throw in a cousin factor to allow for cousin or remote cousin marriages. At some point the number will match the population of Britain at the time, so let's try to see when that is.

If I use 2^x (2 raised to the power of x) instead of 2 as the multiplier after generation 2 then x is the proportion of ancestors in a generation which should be retained (ie not people we have seen already or whose descendants we have seen already and discounted). x will be between 0 and 1.

If x=1 the sequence continues 8 16 32 and exceeds 10 million in generation 24.

If x=0.5 it continues 5.6 8 11.3 16 and exceed 10 million in generation 45.

The real x is going to be between the two; at 0.76 the 10 million figure is generation 30.

I guess the population of Britain in about 1500 was less than 10 million.

So the practical answer is going to be a generation somewhere in the late 20s. I have found a direct ancestor in my generation 21 who is in her generation 23.

USA

The USA is a harder case because, ignoring native Americans and Orientals, everyone's ancestors 15 generations or so back would all be in Europe or Africa. The same calculation as above (with x=.76) puts the population of ancestors at 240 million in generation 36. Quite likely this would be more than the combined population of E & A back then - but black and white populations would not have intermarried much until comparatively recently, so a black person is much less likely to have a shared ancestor with George Washington than a white person.