On 03/09/17 15:25, Paulo Canedo wrote: > I would like to know did the Marquis de Ruvigny who was contemporany > of Mary Ann Buttivant and said almost no one in the working classes > were descendants from Edward III trace this line? If not I would say > his studies were not as good as many say. Or did Ruvigny find some > illegitimacy in the line to exclude it from his publications? I have no idea whether de Ruvigny knew of this line, but I would be interested to know exactly what he said about working class descendants of Edward III. It seems frequently to be repeated that "experts say" 80% of the population (presumably meaning the English or perhaps British population) are likely to be descended from Edward III. I've never seen a citation for this figure, and it smacks a little of being an off the cuff remark by someone who hadn't a statistical model to back it up; nevertheless I don't intrinsically find it hard to believe. Of course, this supposed 80% figure refers to any descents, not a verifiable descent. All the same, my guess would be the that the majority of verifiable descendants of Edward III were either working class or descended through a working class ancestor. During the last, say, 300 years, during which period it is relatively straightforward to trace descents regardless of social class, there have been vastly more working class people than in the gentry. Let's consider the documented descendants of Edward III living 1700. Maybe very few were working class, but a small number demonstrably were. Over the last 300 years, low class mobility means the descendants in the gentry, which doubtless comprised the majority of the gentry, have married into each other's families; while the few working class descendants are so dissipated that are unlikely to have intermarried. The result is that the number of verifiable working class descendants will have increased enormously much faster than those in the gentry. So I would be astonished if it were not now the case that the majority of verifiable descendants were working class or had descents through a working class ancestor. But perhaps that's not what de Ruvigny meant. If what he meant was that only a small proportion of the working classes had a verifiable descent, I would agree. And I would absolutely agree if he meant that only a small proportion were aware that they had a verifiable descent from Edward III. We also need to remember that a century has elapsed since de Ruvigny's time, during which there has been a further century of social mobility, of population expansion, and most importantly, interest in genealogy has really taken off outside the gentry. Richard