Other Caesars went out of their way to kill off any relatives.
No one is descended from Julius.
Form other Roman Emperors? Sure.
Saying no one is documented to descend from Julius Caesar is accurate; saying no one is descended is perhaps overstating the provable case. Given his alleged history, HE may not have known for sure if he had any rugrats among the slave women, mistresses, wives of political rivals, etc., whom he is reported to have bedded. If a camp follower in Gaul bore his child, that fact remained unknown to the wider world, but that doesn’t make it impossible.
Given the proclivity for the Romans to screw their slaves I can pretty much guarantee non-caste children of the Julians issued. Whether or not they got claimed or not is another question. Short finding extractable documented DNA we have no way of knowing.
But the converse is also true - short DNA analysis, casual bastardy can also mean that claimed “official” offspring of some royal’s wife may not have been his actual issue.
You should be our king.
I don’t even know the name of my great grandparents, and have zero interest in knowing. Why should I care if I am descended from Cleopatra, the queen of Sheba, or Lucy?
I believe this is incorrect, foolsguinea. As has been stated and explained numerous times in this six-year old thread (such as here), if you go far enough back in time, it is a mathematical certainty that any person living at that moment in time is either an ancestor of everyone alive today, or has no living descendants–with no exceptions.
This statement, however, is correct.
Note that Colibri says: “By the time you go back 2000 years, or around 100 generations, you are descended from essentially everyone who was alive in Europe at the time who has living descendants [emphasis added].”
In Europe, there wasn’t a discrete caste system. It was continuous.
The third child of a duke isn’t at the same level as a duke. They’d usually marry someone lower down. That person’s later children might marry even further down, etc. After 5-10 generations, you could be getting into the local “well off” folk at best.
It also goes the other way: Look at the 6 wives of Henry VIII. Only the first was of somewhat comparable status (child of a king). 3 of them were daughters of somewhat minor folk. (And one of those produced Elizabeth I.)
Other circumstances disrupted the system. E.g., Norway essentially lost almost all of its nobility during the years of Danish rule. The descendants of once powerful nobles later became landed gentry, and many times not even that. This type of thing happened a lot. Look at what the current heir to the Ottoman Empire is doing.
To assert that people only married within some sort of fictional caste system is just wrong.
Henry VII’s grandfather himself was a minor nobleman.
There’s also the point that (until the advent of modern medical systems) people at least a few rungs up the social ladder were more likely to have surviving offspring than those at the very bottom, where the effects of malnutrition, overcrowding, overwork, etc., are most pronounced. Plus, downward social mobility was likely more common than upward, certainly in countries that practiced the English system of primogeniture. Everything goes to the eldest son, but the younger son(s) and the daughters who didn’t snag an eldest son for their husband would be a notch or two lower down the socioeconomic ladder than their parents, and their own younger children would slip even further.
The typical European social system was a pyramid: a small royal or princely family, a somewhat larger high nobility, even larger lower nobility, still larger gentry/prosperous burgher class, and a very large pool of peasants and small-holders. The younger scions of royalty married into or became the high nobility, the younger scions of which married into or became lower nobility, etc., etc., etc., with the very poorest of the poor at the bottom not having surviving younger scions anyway (and most illegitimate offspring falling several to many rungs below their higher-ranked parent). In effect, that’s a pump pushing royal descent into lower echelons, until after enough generations pretty much everybody is descended from the guy who was once at the top.
I’ve known my family to be descendants of Julius from my fathers’s mother but I don’t know where it goes from then, at less I know I am a descendant from Julius, also, I’m from Europe uk
While it is true that English Kings tend to marry lesser personages — especially compared with Germany where a noble must marry a comparable noble to retain inheritance rights — I’ll have to nitpick. Catherine was more than “somewhat” comparable. In addition to her king-father, her Mother was the great Isabella of Castille, “the most influential woman in all of history.” Both Catherine’s sisters were Queens; her nephews included two Kings of Portugal and two Holy Roman Emperors.
This is a key point. Even if the procreative advantage were only slight (in fact it’s huge), an effect like “compound interest” makes it easy to understand why everyone is descended from Kings.
I hope you can get your father’s mother to divulge the details. They will revolutionize Julius’ biography, not to mention the whole field of genealogy.
Read the thread. Your “knowledge” is family lore, guaranteed to be inaccurate or flatly wrong and if we accepted it we’d be failing the boards mission of fighting ignorance.
While this is true for Europe (and pretty much the rest of the world), there are a few lineages in China, Korea, and other East Asian nations that go back very far, and there is a decent amount of evidence suggesting that many people can trace themselves back to Confucius:
Study finds single bloodline among self-claimed Confucius descendants
This is simply false, regardless of how you define “renaissance.” For example, using the genealogy of Stewarts it is certain that Y-chromosome SNP R1b-S781 occurred specifically in John Stewart of Bonkill (who was killed in 1298 at the Battle of Falkirk)! There are many many lines that are traced reliably all the way back to Saint Arnulf, Bishop of Metz, born circa 582 A.D.
And there are much older genealogies than that that are considered reliable, for example genealogies relating the nobles of ancient Rome to each other. The problem isn’t that reliable ancient genealogies don’t exist; the problem is that the links from Antiquity to the Middle Ages are unknown. This is due in large part to the replacement of Europe’s Roman aristocracy with their Germanic conquerors.
Yes, there is always a risk of undocumented cuckoldings, but AFAIK this is about as likely to affect recent pedigrees as ancient pedigrees.
Not to mention that is a Euro-Centric view of things. Chinese family books have been known to go back hundreds and hundreds of years. Yo Yo Ma can trance his ancestry back to 1217.
I’ve traced my blood line back to ceasar!!!
Confucius’ bloodline (and he pre-dates Caesar by centuries) apparently really is traceable to the present day. A guy I know who’s knowledgeable about Chinese history says that the women have historically been kept under pretty strict control so the chance of illegitimacy is quite low. That blew my mind when I learned about it, and probably says something about the level of social organization in China, historically, compared to anywhere else in the world.
To Julius Caesar? Or to another emperor? Because there’s no record of Julius Caesar having any grandchildren. All his known children died without heirs.
Moderator Note
Mamakaraba, we prefer that old threads in General Questions only be bumped to provide new factual information. Since this does not, I’m closing it.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator