On Thursday, September 7, 2017 at 4:19:17 PM UTC-7, Peter Stewart wrote: > And I should add the following question then occurs: What factors > (socio-economic, geographic or other) might cause some Americans to have > a disproportionately high representation of the 50%- non-Edward III > gateways in their ancestry? Given that the overall number of immigrants during the period is in the 10s of thousands and we have 150 who are traced to any Plantagenet, most are not going to have a large number of royal-descended immigrant ancestors, and those that do are going to be subject to some pretty large 'sampling' variation. I suspect that if more than one of my grandparents derived from this immigrant stock, I would have several additional royal immigrants and the proportions would tend to converge on the average. taf

On 08-Sep-17 9:47 AM, taf wrote: > On Thursday, September 7, 2017 at 4:19:17 PM UTC-7, Peter Stewart wrote: > >> And I should add the following question then occurs: What factors >> (socio-economic, geographic or other) might cause some Americans to have >> a disproportionately high representation of the 50%- non-Edward III >> gateways in their ancestry? > Given that the overall number of immigrants during the period is in the 10s of thousands and we have 150 who are traced to any Plantagenet, most are not going to have a large number of royal-descended immigrant ancestors, and those that do are going to be subject to some pretty large 'sampling' variation. I suspect that if more than one of my grandparents derived from this immigrant stock, I would have several additional royal immigrants and the proportions would tend to converge on the average. The question of whether or not the small 'gateway' group is a representative sample of all immigrants from England is certainly beyond my ken. Since there were strong confessional factors causing many people to cross the Atlantic until the 19th century, I suppose the emigrants represented somewhat tighter socio-economic groupings than a random sample of the English population (Methodists tended to intermarry with other Methodists, Quakers with Quakers, and so on, for an indeterminate time before and after arrival in America). This is the kind of complexity that leads to modelling rather than direct statistical analysis, so that the study is almost as open to art as to science. Peter Stewart