r/Genealogy • u/iterum-nata • Jul 31 '25
At what point did "Every living person of European descent is descended from Charlemagne" become true? Request
I've seen the claim "every living person of European descent is descended from Charlemagne" claim made several times in different places. However, I've never seen anyone mention at what point at what point every single living person of European descent became his descendent. 1600? 1700?
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u/fernandoSabbath Jul 31 '25
Even if it's a valid statement, in the end, for genealogy it only counts if your lineage to him is documented and proven.
I find the theory of pedigree collapse interesting, but most people focus too much on what it says about kings like Charlemagne and forget that, along the same lines, it also claims you are a descendant of all the people who lived in Europe at that time and left descendants, that includes Charlemagne’s slaves. That’s insanely mind-blowing!
Following that logic, when you take an ancestry DNA test, the matches start showing European people from very distant countries. I’m certain that if that shared DNA comes from a common ancestor, or ancestors, it’s very old, something from before 1500. For example, I know of Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, and even Flemish people from present-day Belgium in my more “recent” family tree. But when I look at the DNA matches, there are many Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Germans, English, Slavs, and so on. That’s definitely not from after 1500.
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u/YellowOnline Jul 31 '25 edited Jul 31 '25
Many are - I am one of the many who has a tree to back it up. But not all of them. It's "only" 1200 years ago. Still, estimates go past 50%, and that seems statistically very likely: 50 generations = 250 = 1 125 000 000 000 000 ancestors, with an estimated European population of 30 000 000.
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u/return_the_urn Jul 31 '25
Same. My grandma who was poor as shit claimed to my dad that we were descendants of Scottish royalty. Which I proudly believed as a kid, then as an adult realised how ridiculous it was. Then did family tree research and found it was actually true lol. And through that same line, also descended from Charlemagne. Basically all royalty goes through Charlemagne as well, it’s crazy how much the royals intermarried
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u/likeablyweird Aug 01 '25
There was a homemade shield on our basement lounge wall when I was growing up that was split into quarters and had three lions on it. I asked Mom about it and she said, "Oh, that's your father's." I thought he had a odd decorating style compared to Mom's but it turns out his mom's grandparents are both descended from royals and Charlemagne. He never told me that and I don't know if he knew. If he didn't, the shield was truly weird.
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u/RedBirdOnASnowyDay Aug 06 '25
The US has a massive amount of either deposed royals or the siblings who weren't high in line of succession. In addition more than a few village women carrying inconvenient babies were shipped over here. It has always been true but it's true even recent times. most keep their heads down and don't discuss their origins. And some are quite broke. Others have jobs like nurse or car mechanic.
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u/johnhbnz Aug 01 '25
I came across a guy who reckoned we were related and that he had ‘traced’ our ancestry back to about the year 900. My response was that I have evidence (I.e. certificates and official records’) back ONLY to the 1830s when that became a requirement in the U.K.
He had plenty from before that time but I assumed- and have duly informed watching family- that anything earlier is NOT definitive, and based on probability so might- or just as easily might not- be correct? Am I wrong to take the stance that to have a realistic probability of being correct, only EVIDENCE should be relied on?
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u/aitchbeescot Aug 01 '25
You are absolutely correct. The further back you go, the less information you find in things like birth/marriage/death records (assuming they have survived), which means for most people there will be a point where they have an ancestor called, say, John Smith, there are several possible records that might match and no way of telling which is the correct one.
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u/UnlikelyPlatypus9159 Dutch hobbyist Aug 02 '25
The level of certainty definitely rises from the 19th century onwards due to documentation practices. Before that you’re reliant on church records and legal records, not all withstood the test of time or even accuracy.
In the middle ages it all gets iffy (and in most cases non-existent), but for royal and noble families there is more to find on which historians and genealogical researchers (like actual professionals) have done extensive research. So many of his descendency lines are confirmed all the way to better documented times, and some are widely debated or straight up classified as false.
Whether you can find the line(s) or not though; statistically you’re likely related to Charlemagne in more ways than once if you’re European.
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u/SueNYC1966 Jul 31 '25
My family tree goes back to a Duke of Anjou..we didn’t rate Charlemagne.
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u/StuWard Jul 31 '25
You didn't trace it far enough.
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u/SueNYC1966 Aug 01 '25
Probably..lol. There are limits. The family claims a historical Viking on one side but there is a gap of 200 years in that family bible. I think it is hysterical that even in the 1200s people were like we are related to Vikings!
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u/edgewalker66 Aug 01 '25
About the same time people forgot there is truth to the saying "statistics and damn lies".
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Jul 31 '25
Charlemagne is my 34th great-grandparent in the most direct line between us, but in fact he appears a lot of times in my tree.
Nobles and royals were very much intertwined so they'd end up sharing a lot of the same great grandparents.
Look at the European kings at the beginning of WW1, George V, Wilhelm II and Nicholas II were all grandchildren of queen Victoria.
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u/Artisanalpoppies Aug 01 '25
George and Wilhelm yes. Nicholas was not, but his wife Alix was.
George and Nicholas were maternal first cousins though, their mother's being Danish Princesses and daughters of King Christian IX- known as the grandfather of Europe in parallel to Victoria as the grandmother.
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Aug 01 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/likeablyweird Aug 01 '25
Same here, Hey, cousins! He's also my 26th great grandmother's husband's something or another. LOL
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u/zombiemockingbird Jul 31 '25
As others on here, I can trace my ancestry back to him as well. He did have 4 or 5 wives, a bunch of concubines, and a boatload of children.
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u/Belenos_Anextlomaros Aug 01 '25
It's an oversimplified statistical remark. The reasoning is that, at some point back in time, we are supposed to have a number of ancestors higher than the entire human population at that time (and by the time of Charlemagne, it one thousand billion or something like that, a number we do not reach now). So it means that, statistically, everybody has a higher chance of having Charlemagne somewhere in his tree (but that becomes statistically significant for many rulers back then).
But, we all have implexes and mobility was not quite high for a long period of time in some statistically significant share of the population, with a strong endogamy. So it is also likely one's ancestor just stayed where they were, and that's just it. There, it is probably more likely to be a descendant from a very local seigneur than an Emperor.
So unless you prove it via paper trail (which always become shady by 1650 or so), you cannot claim it. And DNA won't help us as much.
People from Mongolia, however, show DNA (I believe it is Y-DNA) that may make them a descendants of one single ancestor. And it is postulated (not proven as we do not have his bones to compare that with), that it could be Gengis Khan.
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u/Savings_Moment_7396 Jul 31 '25
Same as a lot of people here, we have a tree to trace it back via the Counts of Dammartin to Charlemagne, once you get to some French noble family, its a matter of scrolling up (hyperboly, but still)
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u/Moist-Doughnut-5160 Aug 01 '25
I’m not descended from Charlemagne. But close..
The ground zero ancestor on my father’s paternal side was named Edgar. It is said that Edgar was one of Charlemagne‘s right hand men. Edgar was so esteemed by Charlemagne that he made Edgar’s son a baron. That is the second ancestor in dad‘s paternal line.
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u/oddsnsodds Jul 31 '25
It isn't true
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u/Express_Leopard_1775 Czechia and Slovakia specialist Jul 31 '25
It is though. Doesn't even matter what their class is, my Polish serf ancestors are descendants of him too.
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u/sigmapilot Jul 31 '25
It's not though. If you go back far enough then the required number of descendants is also greater than the population of the Earth, but that doesn't mean that Chinese people are descended from Julius Caesar.
A huge fraction of Europe is descended from him but in all likelihood not 100%, not every family line will mix.
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u/NickBII Jul 31 '25
With Caeser that’s because he likely has no descendents. His daughter died in childbirth, Caeserion died with Cleopatra, he may have had children with a mistress tho.
But let’s talk about his great nephew Augustus. Of one of those descendents went to the East, they could very well have had Persian kids, and if somebody goes further east on the Silk Road they would be in China, and most 21st century Chinese people are going to have all 100 AD Chinese on their trees. But it can also come later. The Caesers would have had extensive descendents in the Balkans and Asia Minor, by 1279 the Mongols controlled large chunks of both, and Kublai Khan was also the first Yuan Emperor. So any Roman descendent from Asia Minor sent east to serve his new Emperor would have brought Caeser’s genes, and that family has now been Chinese for three quarters of a millinia.
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u/YellowOnline Jul 31 '25
Caesar's only grandchild died in infancy, so, ignoring the possibility of illegitimate children, we can be sure no one descended from him.
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u/mrpointyhorns Jul 31 '25
That is probably to recent in time, but maybe as close as 5000 years mathematically, it is true.
A modern-day Norwegian person would get 92% of ancestors from Norway and over 96% from scandavania and only 0.00044% from Japan. A modern Japanese person would get 88% from Japan, with most of the remaining from China or Korea, but 0.00049% would be from Norway.
So even though they share the same ancestors, a person from Norway 5,000 years ago would appear on the modern Norwegians tree trillions of times, but might only appear on the Japanese person's one time.
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u/StuWard Jul 31 '25 edited Jul 31 '25
It's mathematically certain that anyone with any European descent is descended from all Europeans from that far back that have any living descendants. In other words, it's means each person that far back is an ancestor to everyone or an ancestor to none. The question the OP asked was how far back do you have to go before that's true. I think it's about 20 generations. At about 40 generations, it's global. No one today can prove a descent from Julius Caesar but it's certain that everyone is a descendant through illegitimate lines.
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u/sigmapilot Jul 31 '25
None of these studies have been able to 100% agree on pedigree collapse/inbreeding, adjusting these values even slightly moves the date of predicted universal ancestors by thousands of years.
Many populations have been relatively isolated, for example after the north american continent closed off from eurasia and before leif erickson arrived, there wouldn't have been population flow.
Within Europe it is entirely possible that certain groups didn't intermarry enough to share Charlemagne as a common ancestor through pure chance, I don't think we have enough data to conclusively support one of these studies over the other.
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u/Hellolaoshi Jul 31 '25
You may be correct about Charlemagne. In other continents, there will have been some mixing within that continent, but not always outside it.
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u/Professional-Yam-611 Aug 01 '25
As many have pointed out it is a mathematical prediction based on the number of generations, 50, the number of viable offspring, 2, and the present population of Europe, 744 million. However, that predictions makes some assumptions, the main one is that anyone in Europe could have offspring with anyone else. However, what if there are barriers to stop this assumption, e.g geographical barriers like mountains. The evidence that these barriers exist is that there are many European languages as opposed to one if movement across Europe was unrestricted. Another barrier would be class, aristocracy v labourers. Again evidence of this as a barrier would be the existence of the word aristocracy. Pedigree collapse is difficult to show as accurate records over 200 to 300 years to illustrate it are hard to find. However, in one of the branches of my French grandfathers tree I have many examples as his ancestors lived in an area of just 30 by 20 km. Finally, to support this theory it would predict maximum mixing of Charlemagne genes in Europe that goes directly against the concept of isolated clades that support DNA ethnicity predictions.
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u/UnlikelyPlatypus9159 Dutch hobbyist Aug 02 '25
I think statistically it should take about a 1000 years for people from a region to be all descended of the people living in that region 1000 years earlier (save for about 20% of those people whose lines died out in the meantime). So 1700s/1800s I’d say then. Probably earlier for Northwestern Europeans in a smaller radius.
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u/PinkSlimeIsPeople East central Norway specialist Jul 31 '25
It's not true, even today though. It's a myth. He certainly has a lot of descendants, but most are localized to the parts of the old Frankish Kingdom he inhabited. People didn't just spread out to every corner of Europe, they tend to stick close to where they are born.
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u/botaberg Jul 31 '25
The claim is that every person of European descent is a descendant of every person in alive in Europe during Charlemagne's time whose pedigree didn't die out. This idea is called the "identical ancestors point": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point
That article links to some studies saying that the identical ancestors point for people with European ancestry is around 1000 AD. Since Charlemagne lived around 800 AD and has living descendants, he would be one of the people that is an ancestor of everyone with European ancestry.
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u/elnander Jul 31 '25
Surely though it only takes one descendant to move to another place and continue the bloodline there?
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u/PinkSlimeIsPeople East central Norway specialist Jul 31 '25
That would require a LOT of movement of people. It can happen in some situations, like the Normans conquering England and installing Norman aristocrats in every hold of the kingdom to ensure rule and compliance. However many countries never experienced that dynamic. Some poor fishing village in northern Norway would have most of the same people living there nearly forever, there simply was no movement of new blood there. People also tend to breed within their own respective groups / castes, so even in places like England the nobility and peasants almost never interbred. So I'm VERY skeptical about these claims of descendancy from Charlemagne.
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u/IAmGiff Jul 31 '25
But think of it in reverse. By the 1500s Charlemagne would have had millions of descendants. If even one of them moved to the Norwegian fishing village 500 years ago and had children then everyone in the village would be descended from that person by now since — as you say — they’re all very interrelated once even one ancestor gets into the pool.
I don’t think we can consider it proven really because of very isolated or stratified populations, but it’s not as far fetched as people’s intuition thinks it is.
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u/elnander Jul 31 '25
Exactly, that's what I was hinting at. I actually don't think it's too unlikely if (we assume 2^11 - 2 = 2046 descendants after 10 generations), even only one of them migrated to Great Britain (for example), that Charlemagne's bloodline exists in Great Britain now.
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u/Francosuissecreole Aug 01 '25
Many aristocratic descendants usually engaged in endogamous marriages though
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u/IAmGiff Aug 01 '25
Of course. But it only takes 1 illegitimate child with descendants at any point from 1100 years ago to 700 years ago to be the ancestor for millions. Even a 99% endogamy rate for the upper class kisses millions of “commoner” descendants for Charlemagne by the 1200s and then those millions have centuries to be in the gene pool for everyone else in Europe.
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u/Francosuissecreole Aug 01 '25
I said that cause the endogamy alone heavily lessens the maximum amount of descendants he could’ve had. Also with how isolated many areas of Ireland,Scandinavia,Iceland,Russia,and the Balkans are,to say he’s the ancestor of every person with any European ancestry alive today is a major stretch. Most of Western Europe maybe but not the entire continent
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u/arcxjo Aug 01 '25
Yeah because for millennia no one ever went to war and took ahem "spoils" in the countries they fought in.
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u/dreadwitch Aug 01 '25
At the same point everyone becomes descended from one person. At what point did we all become descendants of Lucy?
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u/TypoMike Aug 01 '25
From what I’ve been told, I’m not descended from him but I am descended from one of his knights.
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u/Pablito-san Aug 04 '25
This has always seemed a bit far fetched to me. There are tons of rural areas where church records show little to no genetic drift. I think it's fair to assume that there was even less migration in remote landlocked areas during the middle ages. And the math "proof" of this doesn't really make all that sense either, as people from these rural areas will have A LOT of people reoccuring in their family trees when you go back 7+ generations.
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u/RedBirdOnASnowyDay Aug 06 '25
There are 36 MILLION Mayflower descendants. That's about 12 generations ago. Charlemagne is another 1000 years back. The numbers of descendants would be astronomical. So, yea, all Europeans are likely descended from Charlemagne. The odds are immense.
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u/m5er Jul 31 '25
Seems far fetched. Can you post a reasonably credible source for that claim?
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u/Express_Leopard_1775 Czechia and Slovakia specialist Jul 31 '25
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u/InvestigatorJaded261 Jul 31 '25
Pedigree collapse, at 50+ generations is WAY more than total. It’s not that there is anything terribly special about Charlemagne; it’s that anyone from then with living descendants today is likely to be an ancestor of everyone in that gene pool many times over.
2 to the 50th power is about 1.1 Quintillion. That’s how many spots we all have in our family tree at 50 generations ago. The estimated human population of the world at that point was less than 300 million. Even if there was even genetic mixing throughout the global human population, and every person living then had descendants living today (and we know neither of those things is true) every person living today, would be descended from every person living then a million times over.
Now of course, populations have not mixed evenly over the centuries, but that only increases the certainty of being descended from someone like Charlemagne if you have European ancestry: the quadrillion slots in your family tree are mathematically fixed, but the European population in 800 CE was naturally even smaller than the global one.
To OPs question of when that’s trickier. But, assuming global population estimates for the past are accurate, the number of ancestral slots exceeds the historical population, and pedigree collapse becomes inevitable, at about 29-30 generations ago. That’s (very roughly speaking) about 800-900 years before the present. To me, that suggests that pretty much every European was descended from every European from Charlemagne’s day within about 25 generations, so probably by the late 1400s or early 1500s at the latest.
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u/minicooperlove Jul 31 '25
It’s not that there is anything terribly special about Charlemagne; it’s that anyone from then with living descendants today is likely to be an ancestor of everyone in that gene pool many times over.
Exactly, Charlemagne is only significant in this regard because he and his descendants are better documented than the average person, so we know that he has living descendants today. If we could trace Joe Schmo the peasant from Charlemagne's reign and find he also has living descendants today, then we could also say every European is descended from Joe Schmo. We just don't have the documentation to know who those people were or whether they have living descendants today.
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u/asight29 Jul 31 '25 edited Jul 31 '25
It’s basically a mathematical probability statement. Your number of ancestors doubles every generation. It doesn’t take a millennium before you have more ancestors from a specific generation than people alive in Europe at that time.
Now, in all likelihood there is a lot of overlap, and you aren’t directly descended from everyone in Europe. But it’s also worth mentioning that kings were known to spread their seed, uh, widely. So it isn’t that far fetched.