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On my last visit to my grandfather (father's side), he told me that I descended from Manke Jan van Egmont and thus from Karel de Grote. Apparantly one of my nephews (who does genealogy as part of his work) figured this out. This would make me a Karoling, though, not a Karelian.

Manke Jan killed off a West Frisian farmer's uprising during his life, in which another ancestor of mine might have participated on the other side, as the male line of my father's side of the family comes from this area and were farmers (there's no way to prove that they were there long before 1800, though -- the association with Charlemagne comes through a woman married by one of my great-great-x...-grandfathers who had a genealogy that could be tracked back further).

Assorting to anecdotal evidence, Charlemagne is said to have had a protruding belly and reddish hair, according to the Dutch Wikipedia entry. My belly will also protrude if I don't start exercising more soon and though my hair is blond, my beard is reddish (though this is often ascribed to the Nordic 'Viking' blood I have through my grandmother's ancestors).

The Dutch wikipedia entry also states that genealogists sometimes allege that all Europeans are descendants of Charlemagne.

My mother's family came to the east of the Netherlands from Belgium about 200 years ago and it is rumoured that they have Hun blood. I think little of these rumours, but it is funny to entertain the thought that I descend from both Charlemagne and Attila.

by nanne (zwaerdenmaecker@gmail.com) on Thu Nov 1st, 2007 at 05:39:45 PM EST
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The Dutch wikipedia entry also states that genealogists sometimes allege that all Europeans are descendants of Charlemagne.

I was recently talking to someone about how difficult it is to become a licensed genealogist because I guess people like to scam clients: charge insane fee to tell them they are the direct descendant of Shakespeare or Julius Caesar or some nonsense.


"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

by poemless on Thu Nov 1st, 2007 at 05:44:42 PM EST
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Everyone's got that little amoral megalomaniac in the head.

Or at least you can make an industry out of the people who do.

by nanne (zwaerdenmaecker@gmail.com) on Thu Nov 1st, 2007 at 05:57:20 PM EST
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It's not unlikely that it would be true ; national common ancestors need not be very far away in the past. I think there are millions of male-line-only descendants of someone who lived in the 13th century and is supposed to be Genghis Khan (the name is only an hypothesis), according to Y-chromosome evidence

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
by linca (antonin POINT lucas AROBASE gmail.com) on Thu Nov 1st, 2007 at 08:37:12 PM EST
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Let's do the math: Charlemagne is about 40 generations away, would there be no inter-mixing, that's 240 or c. 1 trillion great38-grandparents... at a time world population was just 200 million. So I take the hypothesis that Charlemagne is the ancestor of 95% of white West-Europeans living as proven beyond reasonable doubt...

The same for Genghis Khan: c. 25 generations away, makes c. 17 million great23-grandfathers, that's some 4% of the then world population, could still be regionally discernible in the gene pool.

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Sat Nov 3rd, 2007 at 01:52:39 PM EST
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