While I do not make any claim to be descended from Charlemagne, the storied emperor of the west, I would only go so far as to say that while there are certainly many invalid claims to decent from him and from Alfred the Great and William of Normandy and various and sundry other medieval magnates, there are also quite a few that appear to be valid enough. The reason I think has to do with Charles Martel, Charemagne's grandfather. He was a natural son of Pippin of Heristal, mayor of the paplace to various and sundry Merovingian kings (this is all French history) and his father's wife, Plecturde, when Pippin died, natrally enough wanted to promote her own progeny in place of those of a rival. Charles Martel, who apparently was not raised in the palace was imprisoned and gained a rather violent and war like disposition (prisons were rougher then). Coupled with an impecable sense of strategy he broke out, acquired his step mother's royal treasure and proceeded to take over Germany and France piece by piece and with great vioence (stopping the Arab invasion of Europe at Tours in 732 AD). The local nobility and gentry, many of whom supported his step mother's claims or those of a rival house, he replaced with his relatives and followers, initiating a Carolingian tradition that was to persist another 300 years. A local magnate or baron greatly enhanced his security by marrying a Carolingian or the daughter of one. Since Charles was the third one to really follow this policy, most of the nobility of France and Germany can trace its "roots" to Charlemagne (Since Charlemagne had a number of children who in turn hhad a number of children and the Carolingians were never exterminated the way a lot of royal dynasties were but went out with a whisper so to speak) they literally have hundreds of millions of descendants at this point (Assuming one generaltion per 25 years a person born today today mathematically speaking would have ancestors in the number of 2 times itself 50 times less one person. The odds on a person of European extraction, particularly the British Isles or Western Europe, not having a Carolingian ancestor, ie Charlemagne, are remote) The Carolingians are known to history to have been ancestors of the Angevins, the Dukes of Brittany and their subordinate counts, the Norman house, the Poitevin House, the Savoyards, the Dukes of Flanders and all of the other sorts whose younger sons followed William to England in 1066. Even before that there were a couple of Carolingian women who were married to Saxons who were felt to merit such a match (times were different). The old Carolingian custom of securing your lords favor by marrying one of his daughters was continued under the Normans and Plantagenets and Tudors for the next 400 years. There were literally hundreds of families who had a drop or two of Carlemmagne's blood by 1600 and it was not thought at that point to be anything impressive (Ties to more recent monarchs, Plantagenet and Tudor, and their magnates were more useful in those days). We know they were useful because in the Tudor period combination of the development of the nglish wool trade with the low countries which had been developing since the 1300's and the arrival of the Rennaissance transformed British society and economy and a number of families who did not have the necessary connections or could not prove them fabricated them. This is always an area to be careful of when looking at the Heraldic Visitations that went on in that era to establish just who was supposed to be who. Most of them are legitimate enough and a little boring but if you take some of them at face vale you have people with French Norman ancestors in England or Scotland in the 800's or 900's and that simply was not the case. Such skullduggery notwithstanding, younger sons of the nobility and more often of the gentry began to enter trade and some of them became enamoured of the new Calvinist doctrines that were appearing at Cambridge and elsewhere. Some of these people were part of the great Puritan, Quaker and other migrations that came to America in the 1600's and 1700's. I won't try here (on the Oneida page) to say which ones I would think are right or wrong and I don't think my opinion would be of much value as that is not particularly my specialty (though it is an interest) However the Book The Plantagenet Ancestry of Edward III and Phillipa of Hainault by George Moriarity (published back in the '50's I think) is pretty good I think though much material has since been expanded by other researchers, primarily Medieval historians. Weiss Ancestral Roots of 60 colonists is pretty standard and they used to reissue that every few years when they found that a pedigree could not be supported or when they found a new connection. Also, Falaise Roll is quite interesting for its information on the French ancestries of Norman knights and soldiers whoi came with aor afte William I to England (Moriarity didn'T like the English information and they generously put his criticism of the work in a postscript so that readers would get both sides of the story). Those three works are pretty sound. There are a lot of unsound works out there (Including one I suspect by the reigning head of the House of Stewart, a young Belgian named Michael, ad the only part I take issue with is that I have never heard of the Breton ancestors of the Stewards of Dol and Dinan prior to the year 900, but then maybe that information was handed down in his family. For 1000 years. That's a joke.) Certainly for the Oneida page, the relevance of Charlemagne, except as a conversation topic among us, is probably limited. But I would only go so far as to say that while it is always wise to view any claim to a pedigree dating back 1250 years with a certain healthy caution, such pedigrees do exist even in America (I will say Moriarity demonstrated his tie to Charlemagne through Edward III and thence through the Neville family fairly convincingly) The key thing is always I believe to approach each piece of information with an open mind and such background as we can bring to the study of that information so that we can make a judgment as to whether we are able to believe it or not. No doubt the best American pedigrees to Charlemagne are supported by documentation at every step. Many pedigrees of 100 or 150 years are much harder to document given the hard conditions on the American frontier. I have a couple of Oneida ancestors [Harriet Balkeslee of Kirkland b. 1804 and Giles Judson of Vernon born 1824] from the first half of the nineteenth century that are proving more of a challenge to find parents for than connecting to Charlemagne would likley be and though I have my ideas about it I am going to sternly resist the temptation to assume more than I ought to and with all of your help I hope to properly identify these people. That is the most improtant priciple which peoples observations have reinforced for me in this intersting exchange. My problems are a lot more recent than Charlemagne. I wrote the foregoing mainly because I enjoy early medieval history as well as genealogy and it was a chance to talk about it [which does not come often]. In return I have received from the others who commented a reminder that it is important to be cautious about trusting far flung and fabulous assertions of relationship and undocumented sources that I promise personally to take to heart. Grady Loy