I sometimes carry ma' weed in a purple velvet bag with gold rope.
That count?
its not really a big thing being descended from kings.
most of them had 1000 bastards or so.
probably most people in the world can count a king or 2 as their ancestor.
that scandinavian king i mentioned, had at least 1000 bastards.
I heard he was a real pinhead. Dandruff must have been terrible back then.
I'm still a long ways from finishing with the chart, but not seeing too many bastards in my family bro...except within the last two centuries or so, in isolated cases.
So far I'm up to 8 or 9....kings that is....countless dukes, earls, counts, princes and princesses, lords, knights, stewards, etc. I wonder if "most people in the world" really are direct descendents of 8 or 9+ British, French, Norman, Spanish, and Scottish kings? That's just on ONE side of the family! I haven't even started on the other....which I think may contain some Cherokee (untraceable I'm sure), and possibly its own surprises through the English/Welsh "Henry" line.
These aren't discreet, isolated incidents. These are recorded family lines. There's many examples of given names i.e. "Thomas", "William", "John" and family history being passed along through multiple generations (2nd, 3rd, 4th....9th, 10th, etc), maybe ending in a daughter after many generations (all of whom married into nobility themselves) who was then married off to some other noble family, or into some new line of descent which arose from nothing, conquered some small area, and became worthy enough to marry into nobility, and so on.
Some people say the study of this type of stuff is worthless, but they are dead wrong. Our ancestors knew that recording these stories, names, and deeds was important, so that's why they took such great care of record keeping that we can trace back this information 1000+ years. By tracing back these characteristics and traits through generations we can discover more about who we are.
Think of it like this. If you sprout a random cannabis seed you were given and out pops a totally bad ass pheno....no, you don't have to know the history of that seed to grow it out and make awesome pot from it. But if you DID know the history, and knew it was a cross of say Skunk#1 and Haze, and knew the history of those lines...that would tell you a great deal more about that plant than you could ever possibly determine just by observing the plant alone, and much more quickly.
Bottom line is stories are important to the human race. Now that I know a little more about the story of where I came from, and where others around me came from, it makes it easier to put the world around me in context and understand why people are the places they are today, and where they are headed.