Rummaging in the Royal Attic

 As anyone who's played around with genealogy for a while soon learns, it's no great rarity to discover "royalty" in the family lineage. There are millions of descendants of Henry VIII (to take one example) walking around on American soil, all of them quite ordinary citizens with not a trace of royal airs.

Nevertheless, it's kind of fun to poke around in those "noble" branches of the family tree. Getting back to that scoundrel Henry VIII, he would be my 3rd cousin, 15 times removed. There is absolutely no reason to be proud of this, it's just one of those "fun facts" one runs across in the ancestry game.

I'd known for a while that I was also related in some way or another to several of Henry's six unfortunate wives. This morning I started looking into the others, only to discover that, yes, all six of them occupy a twig in my family tree.

Here's the tally:

Henry VIII (3rd cousin, 15x removed)

  1. Catherine of Aragon (4th cousin, 15x removed)
  2. Anne Boleyn (13th great grandaunt)
  3. Jane Seymour (2nd cousin, 15x removed)
  4. Anne of Cleves (9th cousin, 13x removed)
  5. Catherine Howard (1st cousin, 15x removed)
  6. Catherine Parr (3rd cousin, 16x removed)
All I've got to say is, this calls for a song:



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