Ok so this is all mind blowing and hard to swallow right? Descent from Adam and Eve psshht ya right! Well I should talk about how I even made this tree in the first place and where did the data come from? The answer of course is the internet. All my data ultimately came from other people who uploaded the info onto the internet. Except the more recent data closer to the trunk of my personal tree that is relevant to myself. Believe it or not, it's actually easier to find genealogical data the further you go back, because the further back an ancestor lived, the more descendants he has now living. It is said that there is a genealogist in every family, so the more genealogists there are researching an ancestor, the more is known about that ancestor. This only applies back to about 500 years ago or so, and after that you just take whatever you can get - whatever history remembers. And the question must be asked: "How true and valid is this tree as a whole, in its entirety?" Can we really swallow the hypothesis that Adam and Eve were our 186th great grandparents and every discrete step along the whole line of descent could actually be valid and continuous? Answer: The tree is only as true or valid as the sources that provided the info. In recent times those sources could be birth records, death records, wills or probate records. Further back, say 300 years ago you might get letters of correspondence or ships' logs of passengers or legal records of land holdings. Further back, say 500 years ago in England you might have only scant Church parish records - the lucky ones to not have been consumed by fire yet. Beyond that in the middle ages, there is surprisingly a lot of information for the genealogies of land owners. For within the houses of the barons and aristocracy, there could be many diverse sources of info that correspond like puzzle pieces coming together to recreate the family tree picture. As you continue to go back further, the validity and fidelity of the information decreases sharply as you deviate from royalty. Once you get back to around the Norman invasion of England and the Battle of Hastings in 1066 AD, information drops off very sharply for everyone. It's similar to the way family trees tend to vanish as you try to cross the barrier of the American immigration. The Normans who were ultimately of Viking ancestry invaded and displaced the Saxon royal houses, and in Saxon England before William the Conqueror, people didn't have last names. Last names emerged after this time by law and decree for the purposes of tax collection. So for pre-1000 AD in England and Europe ancestry is constrained mainly to the extreme upper levels of the elite. At this point, pretty much any document of written history is fair game. The Bible gives all kinds of genealogies from Adam to David to Jesus and everywhere in between, so I used that data. Archaeology and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt give us bits and fragments of dynasties and royal lines. The Annals of Ireland give genealogies. Clay tablets, or old manuscripts or papyrus scrolls salvaged from the Great Library of Alexandria were used. Essentially anywhere and everywhere that family lines and relationships can be found is all fair game. And it's certainly the case that many contradictions, inconsistencies and impossibilities come to bear. There has always been plenty of incentive for people to engineer and contrive pedigrees of descent from royalty where objectively there was none. But what I have done personally is just to accrue and compile as much as I can from home on the internet - trying to assemble it all into a coherent, self-consistent ancestor tree as much as possible. So there certainly are many deviations from reality. Certainly it is not all objectively true. The tree as a whole is only as accurate as the fidelity of the original sources. So I hereby give you the following disclaimer, which also appears on every page of the books I've printed out:
"The relations herein shown are only displayed with as much accuracy as possible. The author feels this family tree to be about 95% correct in its entirety, but should be viewed as more of a guideline for future research than as 100% literal truth." (Note: most of the tree occurs within the last 1000 years of present, so on the average perhaps 95% is plausible? Obviously as you go back further, a claim of 95% accuracy is flat-out ridiculous when you're in territory of myth and legend.
That said, this family tree is clearly a lot more than my own personal family tree - it is all of humanity's. Is it any reason to get a big head because I can claim I am directly descended from King Edward I "the Longshanks" of England, and William Wallace, and Robert de Brus and the whole host of other characters from Braveheart? No. Everyone is descended from all these same royal families and dynasties. It's long been known in the genealogical community that if you have any European ancestry at all, it is mathematically certain you are a direct descendant of Charlemagne. Or to phrase it more correctly, the probability that you are NOT a direct descendant is so close to zero that within some confidence interval, we can be 99.99% confident that statistically yada yada blah blah etc etc.. <insert statistical analysis here>. I recall reading from several sources that,
"...If one goes back far enough in time, approximately 80% of the individuals are ancestors of everyone in the current generation, with the remaining 20% having no descendants in the current generation...(Chang 1999)"
Which is to say that while you are descended from Charlemagne and royalty, you are also descended from ~80% of the entire population from across that slice of time, while all descendants from the other ~20% have gone extinct. Note that this statistic comes with the condition that progeny is modeled as a Poisson distribution. So it's nothing special that we're descended from royalty - you are, I am, and so is everyone else. The only question is are you dedicated enough to trace it? Now that the genealogical community has had the benefit of the internet for several decades, some really interesting phenomena are beginning to emerge. My tree back in 2009 might possibly have been the world's largest coherent unified ancestor tree in existence. Or maybe not, but even if it was or is, it won't be for long. Someone can simply take it and add a few more ancestors, and poof, now theirs is the biggest. I haven't really kept up with genealogy since 2009, but it appears to me there are some mega-gigantic world family tree projects being assembled and compiled democratically from many remote participants and contributors. In an emergent, bottom-up, open-source kind of way, these things are being built up in the online community, and soon enough my huge tree that took me literally thousands of hours to construct will be obsolete. So for whatever it's worth, that's why I'm trying to publishing it now instead of sitting all alone on a hard drive.
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