Thursday, April 28, 2011

Geni.com has Royal Family in its Database

Following up on my post of yesterday about Prince William's ancestry, I see that www.Geni.com has provided an interesting graphic on their The Genealogy of the Royal Family page.  Here it is (thanks Geni.com!):


Create your family tree on Geni for free, and connect to the World Family Tree to find out if you are related to the Royal Family.

I noticed right away the claim that Charlemagne is the 27th Great-Grandfather of Prince William.  The chart of this ancestral line is here on Geni.com. 

I went back to the Ancestors of Prince William site and noted that on the list there that Charlemagne is listed as a 31st Great-Grandfather (in ten places!).  There is one listing for him as a 30th great-grandfather, but it is as an Alternate sperm donor, er, ancestor.

So which one is right?  I don't know.  I started to compare the two lists.  The first difference I saw was in the 13th generation back from William - Geni.com has the mother of Christina von Hessen as Christine of Saxony;  the FabPedigree site has the mother as Margaret von der Saale (1522-1566), and lists Christine  Wettin of Saxony (1505-1549) as an alternate.  The trail back on the FabPedigree site is lost after one more generation, wh.  ile the Geni.com database shows the line back to Charlemagne.

What are the authoritative sources used by these databases?  Jamie D. Allen, who owns the FabPedigree site, lists his sources and contributors - many of whom are fairly well known and active in medieval genealogy circles.  As far as I can tell, Geni.com doesn't list the sources for Prince William's tree. 

An anonymous comment on my earlier post suggested two websites -

1)  www.Genealogics.org - nice site, Prince William's page is here.  Unfortunately, I can see only 8 generations at a time, and can't quickly look at the line back 30-some generations.

2) Paul Theroff's Online Gotha. The Great Britain page has only descendants of George I, King of England.

 I am drawn to this "celebrity ancestor" part of genealogy like a magnet, it seems.  Must.not.submit.to.this.folly!  Or I could add several more generations to my Geni.com tree and try to show off my own illustrious royal ancestry.  Tough choice!  I'll get back to you on this...

4 comments:

Martin said...

Couldn't they at least give proper attribution to the people who did the research of Kate Middleton's ancestry? I really hate companies that steal research and make believe they did it.

Geni Grant said...

@Martin Nobody stole anything. All of the profiles are linked in the post to their Geni profile. Everything that has been added is viewable. Any sources added are viewable. Everything added has been added by actual Geni users.

Geolover said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Geolover said...

The graphic has a mistake, listing Queen Elizabeth's mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, as "Queen Elizabeth I". The Queen Mother was given title of Queen by marriage, never reigned as Queen, and not properly called "Queen Elizabeth I." Her daughter was given the Roman Numeral "II" following the title of the ~ruling~ Queen Elizabeth I, daughter of King James I.