Why is Danny’s ancestry in the news?
The BBC have chosen Danny Dyer of Eastenders to present a history programme for children. He has looked up his ancestry and found several famous people, including William the Conqueror. I assume something connects these two facts.
Why would I be surprised at his royal ancestry?
This is certainly not in any way a comment on Danny. What surprises me is that he has managed to trace his ancestry as far back as he has. Most people hit the buffers after a few generations. How diligently did your ancestors keep and hand on relevant records?
Why am I not surprised at his royal ancestry?
I wrote an article some time ago which shows how closely most of us are related. All of us in Britain, excluding recent immigrants, go back to the island’s original few inhabitants. Well, not original. Originally nobody lived here. Just when a few people had settled here, they all left because a lot of ice arrived. All our ancestors came here after the Ice Age. However, the population shrank a lot in the fourteenth century due to bad winters and the plague. The survivors became our ancestors. Since the population is much bigger now than it was then, the same people must occur on most of our family trees many times over, whether or not we know who they are.
Are you proud of your ancestry?
As we all have two parents, we must all have four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and so on. The number must double each generation and, however far back you go, famous people, nobility and even royalty will all have the same number of ancestors as common people, and many of those ancestors will be the same. Of course, if you could get the full picture, you would almost certainly find a fair number of rogues, vagabonds, ne’er-do-wells and lunatics as well as the great and the good, on your family tree.
This means that nobody has any right to be too proud of their illustrious ancestors or too ashamed of their notorious ones. We’re all in this together, Danny.
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