Thousands Of Americans & Brits Are Related To Joan "The Fair Maid Of Kent" [1328-1385]

Thousands Of Americans & Brits Are Related To Joan "The Fair Maid Of Kent"
[1328-1385], Countess of Kent and later Princess of Wales -- as she was
married to Edward, The Black Prince.

Hundreds of us can prove it.

Brian Pears...

No you can't! As someone recently posted here, DNA testing of
individuals and their recorded fathers shows that 15-20% of
those supposed fathers could not be the ones whose sperm
actually did the fertilizing. In other words some 15-20% of us
are not the children of the fathers we acknowledge, but rather
we are the children of some male our mothers fooled around with
9 months or so before our births. And, of course, we've no
reason to think that things were any different in generations
past, so, presumably, some 15-20% of everyone on our family
trees did not have the father whose name appears in the birth or

roy.stockdill...

Long snip.....

What an excellent summary, Brian. It is acknowledged by most experts
that what we call a "non-paternity event" has happened in virtually every
family at some stage and the figure frequently quoted is, as you say,
around 15-20 per cent. Thus, no-one can ever be absolutely certain of
their family tree being 100 per cent accurate, whatever the documentary
evidence says. Legally, the child of a married woman is presumed to be
the husband's unless someone actually admits otherwise.

The most interesting studies in a sense involve tracing a matrilineal line,
i.e. female to female to female etc, on the basis that it's a wise child that
knows its own father but most of us can be fairly certain as to who our
mother was! (See my article on the subject in the June issue of Practical
Family History).

Roy Stockdill
Newbies' Guide to Genealogy & Family History:

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about,
and that is not being talked about."
OSCAR WILDE

baptism register.

Don Kirkman...

That figure seems to me to be improbably high, but I know it's in
general usage. However, a recent article (for which at my age I can no
longer remember the source) dealt with cases of mothers having DNA
different from that of their *known* children, for instance newborns.
For some reason these women developed some body parts with their "real"
DNA but others with what would have seemed completely foreign to them.
This discovery bears watching for future genealogists, seekers of errant
fathers (who may not even exist), and seekers of retroactive royalty.

Of course most of us know or knew our mothers and can make up
our own minds as to the likelihood that we feature in that
15-20% - some may even have had DNA typing on themselves and
their fathers and can smugly claim to know their fathers for
sure, but the reality is that 15-20% of us don't know our
fathers and that's bound to include many surprises. Even the
most prim and proper lady may have slipped from her saintly
pedestal on at least one occasion.

But just think of the implications for us genealogists. However
certain we are of our own mothers' virtues and maybe our
grandmothers' too, we certainly can't know how virtuous our
earlier female ancestors were. So even if we reject out of hand
any notion of our own loved ones having fooled around, we can't
say the same thing about earlier ladies - and, based on those
research results, we must accept the probability that many of
their pregnancies were ill-conceived as it were.

Accepting figures for incorrect fathers as high as 20% or more
would make a nonsense of trees extending even 4 or 5
generations, let alone one from Joan. So lets be generous and
assume that old DSH's female ancestors were unusually faithful -
or particularly ugly - and only 15% of their pregnancies were
the result of illicit couplings. What would that do to his tree?

Well, assuming that half of the 18 intermediate ancestors were
male, the probability that this claimed line from Joan to DSH
has any basis in reality is only 0.85 to the power 9 ie 0.23 or
23%. In other words the probability of all 18 steps in that line
being as recorded is only 23% - the probability that at least
one step is wrong is 77%. Or, if you prefer odds, it's more
than 3 to 1 against the line being accurate.

If there were more than nine males in the line, the odds against
would be higher, less than nine and it would be lower. But
whatever the precise figure, I certainly wouldn't put money on
that line representing reality. And that's without the inherent
problems with very early genealogy - I mean the assumptions,
guesswork, wishful thinking and dishonesty perpetrated by both
modern researchers and by the authors of what passes as source
material. So what price these claimed descents from
Thingummybob IV or Whatshername the Wistful - or The Fair
Maid of Kent?

"Ain't no big thing."

Joan is my 18th Great-Grandmother.

Tally Ho, You Ruddy Blaggards!