I’m not sure that there is a different dynamic for rich people. The impetus for intermarriage is whether the individual is in a small group of people, and that defines rich people. Yes, they are much more mobile, but the group of people that they socialise with is defined by their money. Would Ivanka Trump have ever met and married a plumber? Not likely; she would only want to marry someone with money.
After all, pre-industrial revolution, the richest group was likely royalty, which is being discussed in this case because they intermarried. Substitute “rich” for “royalty” and you may have a similar dynamic today.
By “rich world” I meant the places where people aren’t still living in huts in their ancestral villages. Countries with modern economies mostly. I did not mean the top 1% of the world’s wealthy families.
IOW most of North America, most of Europe, a decent chunk of Asia and Central / South America but by no means all.
But not much of e.g. Afghanistan, Mali, or Mongolia. A few spots and a couple of big cities in those countries yes sorta, but not the bulk of that tier of countries.
Decades ago, way before the Human Genome Project was even launched, DesertWife spent time in her graduate years doing the grunt work in a DNA research study. She said a lot more often than you’d think possible the markers would show one of the parents was not the one in the questionnaire. This would not be disclosed to the subject.
The Iowa Amish volunteered a lot for the study and they never found any surprises with their DNA.
I’ve not done the genealogical research, but I know that two of my great-grandparents came from the same small town in Scotland. He emigrated first, homesteaded, and then brought her to Canada. I would be very surprised if they had absolutely no family relationship prior to their marriage.
When I played around with Ancestry I realized that if you could link to a U.S. president it made things much easier. Every president has their genealogy extensively mapped out. Someone has already done the work for you. Family lore said that a great aunt of mine had a genealogist make a family tree and it said we were related to Lincoln. Everyone laughed and said of course they have to have someone famous in there. In the family he is referred to as Uncle Abe. Then ancestry came along and yep there he is. Once I had a common name I could link to Lincoln and his entire tree all the way back to Edward I.
Yep. I’m very proud of Cousin Barack! (my father’s 10th cousin—our mutual ancestor died in Virginia before the American Revolution). It’s kind of a cool factoid, but given the finite number of chromosomes in the human body and their tendency to recombine, I imagine that we have neither genetic material nor family culture in common at this point, so being “related” is utterly meaningless.
But I’m still a bit miffed that in eight, he didn’t once invite me to the White House on Thanksgiving.
I’m aware. Being the great-x grandson of the bad guy in Braveheart is cool enough.
A good website to see connections is famouskin .com. It’s a little clunky but has decent information. I’m related to Longshanks through Hugh Le DeSpenser which means I’m related to everyone famous from Princess Diana to H.H. Holmes (but not directly).
It’s fun that grandpa was drawn and quartered for treason.
I’ve seen an article somewhere [excellent cite!] that speculated Victoria’s haemophilia gene was a random mutation, because there were no signs of it in her ancestral tree.
This was how it was brought out in Robert Massie’s book Nicholas and Alexandra. Massie had reason to be interested in the disease because his son was/is? hemophiliac. We have a case in my own family, a boy who is the grandson of a first cousin of mine. No known history in the female line before this kid. But he does fairly well because of new medicines that were not available a couple generations ago.
Anybody who says things were better “in the good old days” is crazy.
Sorta, it has some pretty big breaks. Henry VI was not in direct line of succession, in fact he had to kill off a LOT of kids to make his throne secure. And James 1 wasnt either. There have been several times they had to dig up someone fairly far removed.
Do you mean Henry VII? His claim as “last Lancastrian standing” derived from his mother’s descent from Edward III, and yes, the connections from him to the Stuarts, and from them to the Hanoverians, derived from the female line (Henry VII’s daughter and 4xgreat-grand-daughter). But then, so did the entire Plantagenet succession, through Matilda.
And ultimately “legitimacy” derived from inheritance from a conqueror in battle, be that Henry VII, Edward III or William the Conqueror, or more recently, a majority in the House of Commons.
There were dynastic breaks, but as @PatrickLondon says, the ones who succeeded always had a claim based on heredity.
Every English and then every British monarch since 1087 has been descended from William the Conqueror, and every one since 1135 has been descended from the pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon royal family.
(assuming, of course, that in that thousand year stretch there were no “ahem” irregularities.)
