The Royals serve a very solid purpose and job for GB/UK, and the other nations that have them. They can do the ribbon cutting, funeral and wedding attending, and all the other stuff our President is expected to waste half his time on. Head of State is a great job for a Royal.
They also serve as a symbol and also a hobby for many. The Royals bring in more $$ into the UK that they cost.
Oh, really? I don’t have an account and can read it. Might be because I’m using a work computer (shhh!).
Basically, as he worked it, going back 7 generations a “normal” person has 254 ancestors, Charles III has 196. Charles II of Spain had 84.
Changing from family relationbships, here’s something.
Both previous King Charles shut down Parliament. Think the current guy will go with the tradition? 
They do not.
That’s my opinion and in part it is a philosophical (if that’s the right word - moral?) objection. What they represent is gross. I suspect we can go round and round on this without coming to a resolution, so I’ll agree to disagree and go no farther with it 
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That assumes that the “normal” person doesn’t have any inter-marrying in their pedigree for seven generations. Prior to the growth of mobility in England in the mid-19th century, with trains, how many “normal” people were there who met that criteria? Or, how many were John Brown and Mary Smith in Upper Tooting?
Before we can accept that Charles III is “mildly inbred”, we have to have a benchmark to measure it by, in real terms, not a theoretical exponential progression.
Dunno. Like I said, I’m sure there was more inbreeding in some small villages. What the average is, I have no idea. But I’m open to being enlightened 
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The chaps down in Westminster have been doing splendid work of rendering themselves dysfunctional for the past few years, he really need not bother.
Techno-peasant strikes again! I was clicking the wrong button. Will read it now.
No, that is not true due to pedigree collapse. That would be maximum number.
https://isogg.org/wiki/Pedigree_collapse
Like most people, the family tree of Elizabeth II to six generations has 64 different people in the 64 different positions.
Seven generations would be 126, 8 generations is 254- but not likely.
Right. It looks like Charles3 is about average for an old family englishman.
Right, I’ve read it now, and in addition to the assumption of “normality” being 254, without evidence that was in fact normal, there’s this statement:
And things only get worse from then on going further backwards. [i.e. backwards from great-great-great-grandparents]
But that’s not how pedigree collapse should be judged; pedigrees can be revitalised, in each generation. George VI married a commoner, with no connection to the royal family for at least three generations back. That changes the pedigree by expanding it for Queen Elizabeth. The most important measurement of genetic diversity is how closely connected one’s parents were, not whether some distant ancestors three centuries ago were closely connected.
The author of the article also makes the point that the reason this was a major problem for the Hapsburgs was that after the Reformation, there weren’t many other Catholic royal families, and royals had to marry royals, so Hapsburgs married Hapsburgs.
That wasn’t the case for the British royal family. Yes, they had to marry Protestant royals, but given the huge number of German principalities, there was a much larger mating pool of Protestant royals. That led to the British Royal family having a large German background in the 18th and early 19th centuries, but there was no inter-marriage on par with the Hapsburgs.
Here’s a guy who did a video:
By “pedigree collapse,” I mean that Charles has demonstrably fewer ancestors six or seven generations back than the average person. I have 256 unique ancestors eight generations back (28); the generation prior, pedigree collapse starts in that (as far as I can tell; data starts having holes), I have only 510 (29 − 2) unique ancestors, because two of my ancestors five generations back were third cousins, and in generation 8, there are two ancestors who are siblings.
I don’t think that’s the same as being inbred, because each coupling of ancestors for me and for Charles III are sufficiently distant that their offspring aren’t terribly likely to be affected—maybe certain recessive traits come to the fore (e.g. hemophilia), but Charles himself clearly doesn’t have the genetic problems of the Spanish Hapsburgs.
That would be unlikely, and that is certainly not the norm in merrie old England.
Triggered by @Dr.Drake 's claim to 256 unique ancestors across 8 generations, about which I offer no specific opinion …
That raises an interesting question:
My thoughts:
If we arbitrarily assume everybody reproduces at age 20, the 8th-generation ancestors of a newborn in 2020 would have been born 160 years ago in 1840.
I can certainly see lots of ways for those 1840 newborns looking to reproduce in 1860 to be urban / suburban by the standards of the day, and also somewhat geographically and / or economically mobile. Which mobility and scale of local mating possibilities will only increase over time. All of which drives towards greater uniqueness of them as ancestors to the 2020 newborn we’re thinking about.
Assuming world civilization holds together another hundred years, I bet a hefty fraction of rich world 2120 babies whose 8th generation ancestors were born in 1940 will have a full set of 256-uniques. And the records will be both reliable and plentiful enough enough to prove it.
Two anecdata’s:
As far back as I have traced my family (back to 1600’s for my maternal grandmother (someone in the 1960’s paid a genealogist)), there is no pedigree collapse (although I do have two first cousins who married and reproduced). It helps that the long traced line (English) married into a German family. I’ve got all my great-grandparents (who all (except the maternal grandmother’s parents) emigrated) - there is likely some collapse there but way back.
On the other hand, my parents moved to a small Minnesota farming community when I was 4. In sixth grade at St Michael’s Catholic grade school we did a genealogy project. With the exception of one girl whose family moved in sometime after we did, pretty much everyone was related, at least by marriage, if you went back three generations.
The town was about 1/2 Catholic (we supplied 3 of 8 teams for Church League softball games), and there were ~25 kids in my class.
I’m pretty sure of it - another anecdote. That family tree I mentioned - both my mother’s ancestor’s and my father’s lived in relatively small areas. My mother’s in Sicily and my father’s in present-day Slovenia. My great-grandparents on one side and grandparents on the other emigrated to NY. I am 100% sure that my grandfather and grandmother had some relatives in common when they left that tiny town with a population of about 12,000 and the same for the great-grandparents on the other side. But I can be sure my father and mother didn’t share any ancestors in the last few hundred years because of the geography. I can be sure my husband and I don’t share any ancestors because his parents emigrated from China. My daughter and her husband almost certainly don’t because his father came to NYC from Ireland and his mother grew up in Ohio with some ethnic German ancestry but from a different part of Germany than my ancestors left around 1300. Going forward to the next generation , the chances are really good that twenty or thirty years from now my grandchildren will be partnered up with people of different ancestries especially if they stay in the NYC area.
But all of this happened because my family came to NYC. Had my father’s parents stayed in Europe , he almost certainly would have married someone from that tiny group who would have been a third cousin , if not closer.
Huh. It’s true for me, but it’s pulling ancestors from three UK countries and four continental countries, and my parents are from different countries. Lots of exogamy.
So are we saying Charles’s amount of pedigree collapse IS typical?
My wife is similar. She has an interest in genealogy and has both gone back a long ways and also fanned out a long ways forward from there into the current era as well. Her unusual family name comes from a relatively small village in Europe. Which experienced a flood of emigration to the USA around 1900 +/- a few years.
She has yet to find anyone in the USA with the same surname who is not genetically related to her via that village’s family tree. None of them beyond her immediate cousins and their downline have any genetic connection to her since the migration, but the overlap is total from before then.
We are living through a watershed era of human genetic history.
How sure can we even be about parentage going back three or four generations? Of all of those daddies, one or two might be different?
I’m not quite following which idea you’re commenting on by who.
But I’ll suggest that we can never be 100% sure that 100% of all official birth and parentage records in modern countries are 100% accurate vs actual genetics with exactly zero defects across billions of birth records. So if that’s what you mean by “sure”, well, … we’re not sure.
But we’re pretty darn close. And getting closer all the time. Speaking just for me, I would be willing to stipulate that 256-unique birth records are close enough to consider as if that’s 256-unique bio-parents.
The remaining noise in the signal is a drop in the bucket compared to the active pollution from the pre- governmental records era, the “nearly everybody lives and dies within a 10 mile radius of their birthplace” inbreeding era, and the “unwed mothers are scandalous and all records must be falsified to hide this fact” era.