Descent From Royalty

The Washington Post reported yesterday that Brooke Shields is descended from royalty, and they're trying to tell me that I am too.

Actress Brooke Shields has a pretty impressive pedigree -- hanging from her family tree are Catherine de Medici and Lucrezia Borgia, Charlemagne and El Cid, William the Conqueror and King Harold II, vanquished by William at the Battle of Hastings.

Shields also descends from five popes, a whole mess of early New England settlers, and the royal houses of virtually every European country. She counts Renaissance pundit Niccolo Machiavelli and conquistador Hernando Cortes as ancestors.

Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say, the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.

Pardon my skepticism, but I have seen nary a trace of a royal personage in any of the upward-reaching branches of my family tree.

The traced line that goes back the longest is the Dutch one. They were French Huguenots who escaped Louis the probably XIII to Holland, where they married a lot of Dutch people who were laborers and bakers and other un-noble folks. It's really doubtful that, as Huguenots, there was any interbreeding with French nobility. Unless one of the women was a serving wench who was taken advantage of and then tossed out on her keister when her condition made itself obvious. But there's no hint of that anywhere that we know of.

The closest I can get to royalty is one line on the other side of the family, from the Scottish clan MacDonald of Sleat, which would make me related somehow (though my Grandpa never claimed descent) to Flora MacDonald, the bonnie lass who smuggled Bonny Prince Charlie from Scotland after his defeat at the battle of Culloden.

No, I've got Dutch tailor ancestors and Hungarian peasant ancestors and a drunken, wife-beating, English great-grandfather, and scads of other non-descript Irish, German, and Polish ancestors.

I may turn out to be special by not being related to royalty.