King Paul I of America makes the news

Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak wrote an article in Ancestry Magazine in September issue about The Man (or Woman) Who Would Be King of America - I commented on it in Is it King Frank II, Queen Brynda or King Paul I?

Now Ancestry issued a press release yesterday with an article titled Ancestry.com Reveals Who Would be King of America and Candidate Roots as Presidential Election Approaches. It appeared essentially verbatim in newspapers around the country.

The beauty of articles like this is that they provide an entree for researchers to talk about their addic..., er, passion for genealogy and family history. I fully expect several people to bring the article to the CVGS meeting today and for people at church to give me copies of it on Sunday and ask if I read it. Of course, I will ask them if they have researched their ancestry - perhaps they are related to Barack Obama or Sarah Palin like I am, or perhaps to George Washington or John McCain. They will tell absolutely unique family stories, and each one fascinates me.

This addic..., er, passion that I, and most of my readers and colleagues, have is full of surprises and rewards and disappointments. We find stories that inspire us, and a few that repulse us, as we find that most of our ancestors were people who lived typical lives in their time, but some were exceptional, whether they were kings or horse thieves.

Here's one to chew on: If Robert Seaver, who came to Roxbury in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634 as a 26 year-old man, had proclaimed himself King of Massachusetts Bay Colony somehow, and the line was never overthrown, that I would be King of Something today, since I am the agnatic primogeniture descendant of this Seaver line - the oldest surviving son, that had male offspring, through 11 generations. Megan's article explains all of this, of course, but the Ancestry press release doesn't.

Does anybody else know that they are the agnatic primogeniture descendant - the oldest surviving son of the oldest surviving son, etc. back to colonial times?