When we hear someone remark with pride that they are descended from, say, Henry VIII, the appropriate response should be laughter. For whites at least, it would be very unusual NOT to have an enormous array of royalty and Barons, Bishops, etc in the direct ancestry. The only difficulty is finding a path to them among so many other paths. To take an example, (genealogy being a hobby I sometimes dabble in) - I located on net a reliable sourced, very large, tree which contained my wife's 12th greatgrandmother (Ursula Tyndale, bn 1510). From her, it was comparatively easy to establish that her (my wife's) first cousin 28 times removed was Macbeth, who killed her 26th great grandfather, Duncan I King of Scotland, in battle (not in bed, as Shakespeare fictionalised the story) in 1040. Such 'finds' are rather like being surprised that a monkey, tapping at random on a typewriter forever, should type out a Shakespeare sonnet. When you see the rest of what it typed, you are not at all surprised. Theoretically, we each have around 268 million direct ancestors alive in 1100 AD, and 536 million from then till now. Whereas the world population in 1100 was about 300 million. Not only do we share each others' ancestors, we share our own. It is quite usual that a set of parents may appear in a tree in say the 20th and 24th generation. Large royal families and plural marriages add to the likelihood. The rate at which large, well-researched trees are being added to "Rootsweb","Ancestry World Tree", "One World Tree" etc, and "Genes United" and DNB based sites, is ushering in an age of freely available genealogy very fast. John Barton