Grandpa Charlemagne

My New France breakthrough in my genealogy research got me back to Europe in a new way. Most of my family lines dead end in Ireland 3-4 generations back. Another couple of family lines dead end in Germany in the same range. But the New France family lines were several generations deeper in history than I had gotten with any of those others lines before even returning to Europe.

My ancestors that arrived in Quebec in the early 1600s were some of the earliest colonists in Canada after the fur traders. Two previous settlements of Quebec had failed. They were part of the third settlement, the one that stuck. As part of the early wave of colonists, they were the “second sons”. Those of some means but without lands. So they sought their fortune in the new world.

When working backward through the family, these “second sons” led to minor aristocracy; Barons and Dukes. Minor aristocracy worked backward into major royalty like Princes and Princesses and eventually Kings and Queens. After a couple of near misses, I hit the Holy Roman Emporer himself; Charlemagne, Karl der Große. Charles the Great. I eventually ended up finding something like 6 direct connections back to Charlemagne. The closest direct relationship I found to him was as my 37th great-grandfather.

At that point, I decided to do a little math because 37 is a lot of generations back and I know the numbers double with every generation. So starting with your 4 grandparents and going back just 4 generations gives you 64 greatx4 grandparents.

So how many great x37 grandparents does one have? 549 Billion

Considering the population of Europe at that time was approximately 25-30 Million something had to give.

This is when I learned one of the important lessons of genealogy research. If you go back over a thousand years, your descendants outnumber the population of the world. So you’re related to most of the people that lived at the time and in multiple ways. That’s why I found 6+ connections to Charlemagne. He’s not my great-grandfather once. He was my great grandfather in several different ways across a few different generations. He was also a great-uncle many times. And so everyone of European descent is probably descended from Charlemagne. But we are all probably descending from his stable hand as well. But no one kept his family tree.