Notable Kinship

Go back far enough and everyone with European ancestry shares the same ancestors. Around a thousand years is enough for the mathematics to become unavoidable: the people alive then who left descendants at all are ancestors of nearly everybody alive now. A link to a medieval king is therefore common rather than remarkable, and says nothing about you.

A claim becomes interesting only when it is close enough to be specific and is supported by evidence. That means one of three things, and this archive labels which one applies to every entry.

• Confirmed by shared DNA. A relative of ours shares measured segments with a tested descendant of that figure, at a level that only a genuine recent connection explains. This is the strongest kind of claim and also the rarest, because almost no historical figure has a published genome and their descendants must be tested and identified first.
• Documented on paper. A continuous chain of records connects our line to theirs. No DNA involved; the proof is in the registers, and the chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
• A shared deep ancestral line. The same Y-DNA or mitochondrial grouping. This is real but distant, often thousands of years. It means a common origin, not a family relationship.

Anything that fails all three is a family story, and a good one, but it belongs in the Stories room rather than here. The keepers will not publish a connection on this page without naming the source it rests on.