A couple of years ago I made a great family genealogy book for my mom as a gift. It had all these old family photos along with printouts of census records and a fairly detailed family tree back to the 1200s in England. A few years later I did the same thing for Dan’s parents, complete with maps of where the ancestors came from (Wales, Poland, England, etc. - turns out his family and my family both came from Essex county way back when). I decided to do the same for my Dad for his birthday this year.
On my Grandma’s side, we don’t know much. She’s adopted, and her adoptive family’s last name is “Jones,” so that’s pretty much a dead end.
However, on my Grandpa’s side, I knew just enough to get by on and trace things back a few generations. From there, I filled things out a bit more from census records on ancestry.com and familysearch.org (the Mormon site….they’re friggin baptising everyone retroactively! Annoying and presumptive, but useful!). Anyhow, after you trace things back a few generations, to a woman named Louisa Douglas, born sometime in the 1830s, someone had done all this work to trace our family all the way back to about (get this) 6 AD in England. How, you ask, would they be able to trace things so far back? Well, you see, they keep very detailed records of royalty. Yes, ROYALTY. William the Conqueror is my 32nd Great Grandfather, or something like that. We’re the descendants of one of his bastard children.
Great Great Great etc. Grandpa Bill
Go back from there and you have all these kings of France and Italy and Germany and, of course, Charlemagne. Another branch of the tree goes back to Alfred the Great and on back to Kings of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, another back to Wales in the 300s AD.
Who knew?
Granted, this is all highly questionable. I know they kept some good records and stuff, but seriously, with names like “William Herbert” there has to be some confusion somewhere in there. Granted, if 80% of Asia can trace themselves back to Genghis Khan I’m sure a disproportionate piece of the modern population can trace itself back to some royal family or other, but really, what are the odds?!
So this
is the grain of salt I’m taking it all with, but it’s still fun to imagine that somewhere back in my bloodline are Viking kings. (My brother-in-law, the Vikings fan, will be pleased. Heh.) I’d rather be pictish, but I’ll still expect you to bow and kiss my ring next time you see me. 
