I agree that all peerages will eventually end in extinction, although some (those allowing both males and females to inherit) will last a lot longer. For example, the inheritance rules of the Dukedom of Marlborough are theoretically designed to ensure that the title lasts as long as there are descendants, of either sex, of the first Duke.
Perhaps I’m not understanding you, but distant cousins will be entitled to take the title if they are heirs within the defined category.
I’ve just done a quick and probably not very accurate analysis of 20th/21st century extinctions - gotta do something while waiting to be called into the management meeting. I looked only at the higher titles (dukes, marquesses and earls). The numbers got out of hand if I threw in lower titles.
The extinctions were roughly split by:
those where the last holder had one or more daughters: 36%
those where the last holder had no children, but the previous holder had had one or more daughters: 43%
those where both the last holder of the title and the previous holder had no children: 21%
My wife (well, actually her younger sister, if we’re being picky) will likely be the last with her surname - her father is the last male of the line and had two daughters. She’s an old-fashioned gal and took my surname when we married, so our daughter has been assimilated into the Colophon line. (Bwah-ha-haa…)
Of course, her sister could decide to pass on her surname if and when she has children.
For example, let’s take a specific point in history: 1 Nov 2011. And let’s look at a particular person living at that time: Barack Obama. He has two currently living, direct descendents, so he fails condition 2. And he is not the direct ancestor of Joe Biden, currently living, so he fails condition 1. Thus the theorem is not currently true for that date.
You’re missing the all-or-nothingness of the statement. Noah (if you believe in Genesis) is a direct ancestor of everyone now living. Everyone else in the antediluvian era has no living descendants. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, has direct living descendants, but not everyone alive today is his direct descendant.
Disclaimer: I have no idea if the original statement was accurate.
Yes, Laura Ingall’s parents’ siblings intermarried(?). The Quiners and the Ingalls as the prior poster shared had four unions among the siblings. Small town big families teehee.
There’s a website for relatives of Mark Twain, that is cousins of Mark Twain, thru his siblings and not thru Mark himself.
I’m guessing there are actual Lincoln cousins still out there as Abe did have a sister and a brother.
Thomas Jefferson would have lineage via Sally Hemmings too, so Jeffersons are all over the place. He’s America’s Genghis Khan!
William Davenant, Poet Laureate of England from 1638, was Shakespeare’s godson and rumored to be his son in more than just God. He married three times and had several children.
Another great literary ancestor, Lord Byron, DOES have living descendants, but for several generations his family line just barely managed to stumble along; a good illustration for how easy it could be for a noble family to die out. Byron’s only legitimate daughter 1 Ada Lovelace (herself famous for her work on Babbage’s “analytical machine”) had three children of her own. Her elder son, Byron King-Noel, died unmarried and childless. Her second son, Ralph, married and had two daughters who both died unmarried and childless.
Ada’s only daughter, Anne, married the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Anne suffered many miscarriages and stillbirths, but gave birth to one surviving daughter, Judith. Judith married a younger son of the earl of Lyttton and had three children; her eldest son, Noel, eventually became the fourth earl of Lytton. Noel’s son John is the current earl of Lytton, and all of Byron’s descendants can be found in this small family. I doubt there are more than perhaps 30 descendants of Lord Byron alive today.
Elizabeth Medora Leigh, the daughter of Byron’s half-sister and lover Augusta Leigh, may have been Byron’s biological daughter. She had two children, but her daughter became a nun. Any descendants would have to be through Medora’s obscure French son.
Another example of a family going through several only children before going extinct is found in the descendants of Conrad of Montferrat. Conrad, a scion of the powerful noble family of medieval Montferrat, married Queen Isabella of Jerusalem in 1190. In 1192 he was assassinated, leaving Isabella pregnant with their first and only child, Maria.
Maria married the adventurer Jean de Brienne in 1210, and two years later she gave birth to her only child, Yolande. Maria died shortly after Yolande’s birth. Yolande married the German emperor Friedrich II in 1225. Yolande died giving birth to a son named Konrad in 1228.
He grew up to become Konrad IV of Germany, but died in 1254, leaving two sons of his own: a legitimate son called Konradin, and an illegitimate son called Corradino. Both sons were executed as teenagers by Charles of Anjou.
So from 1192 to 1269, this family went through five generations, with three successive generations being only children, before being snuffed out entirely with the executions of the two young half-brothers Konradin and Corradino.
I’ve made a post in this related thread which argues specific bloodlines dying out may not matter as much as you might think. Your number of ancestors increases exponentially with each generation. If a direct descendant of George Washington was alive today, Washington would be just one of their thousand odd great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents. (I’m making some assumptions here about the average number of years between generations, and ignoring the fact some of the uber-parents would in fact be the saem person, due to things like distant cousins marrying). We may never see their like again. Well, we wouldn’t have anyway.
Alexander IV (son of Alexander the Great) and his mother Roxane were poisoned on the orders of Kassandros. Kassandros also had Alexander the Great’s illegitimate son, Herakles, secretly killed.
I’ve been reading up on Queen Victoria passing on hemophiliac gene to royal families. I know she has direct descendants of course, but was wondering did the hemophiliac gene die out in the family tree? That the hemophiliac males died without surviving children and the female carriers passed on normal children who survived on?
