On 2011-05-17 09:51, Richard Smith wrote: > On May 16, 9:07 pm, "Peter J. Seymour"<[email protected]> > wrote: > >> Oh and some sort of negative factor for any mention of Charlemagne, >> Pharoahs, Moses etc. > > Is it fair to include Charlemagne there? ... > > Richard Point accepted. I am a bit uneasy about such long distance links though. It only takes one mis-reported instance of paternity and the link is completely bogus (at least in biological terms). According to someone else's genealogy I am descended from Edward II. (and lets leave aside the question of what is the point of such claims). Now I don't know how reliable that research was. Even assuming it is accurate, unrecorded liaisons with resulting pregnancy are sufficiently common that one can be the more doubtful about a paternal line the longer it is. So another possible metric would be some sort of statistical probability relating number of generations to the cultural setting and the reliability of the link. How to go about deriving that one, I have no idea. Peter