We are all royalty

Armed with some genealogical information about my father's family (essentially a bunch of farmers), I have taken some of the oldest names and entered into American genealogical websites. With several of the names from around 1650 or so, it seems many enough Americans share ancestry with me that some have done family tree research and put it online.

It is entertaining to see exactly how many of these assembled trees manage to track past the plague and link back to the same little group of Norwegian rich men and then onwards to the viking kings :D (A few of them even add Odin, as a tribal leader around bc 200).

Yeah right.

(Even the book that was written by a relative through my grandmother, and which serves as the basis of my attempted research, contains errors. Either that or one of my forebears gave birth at the tender young age of 82)

Edit: this gets even better.

The above was written after a cursory search on my grandmother's side. This morning, I'm slogging through what seems to be more reliable information on my grandfather's side, find that some of the farmers were apparently quite wealthy, and end up finding this:

"Today, almost anyone with roots in Rogaland can claim
royal descent through her son, Sæbjørn Toresson."

(He seems to be my great(12)-grandfather)

I stand by my sneering at any family tree containing Odin, of course. And, if we are all descended, exactly how inbred are we?

Ah, Science Reporting

Linked from watervole:

This is a news website article about a scientific finding