Finding Your Royal Roots

hi everyone in last week's video I talked about a theory that if true means that everyone alive today is somehow related to medieval royalty well if that's the case how does one go about finding one's connection to a royal line well that's the topic of today's video and I'll be getting help from fellow youtuber Jarret Ross Jarret is the host of a youtube channel called the Genie vlogger which has lots of great tips on how to do research about your own family tree and I'll put a link to his channel in the description so in this video we're first going to look at a website called Genie calm which is not only great for building your own family tree it has a really neat feature which comes in handy when it when it comes to trying to find a connection to royalty so I'm going to show you how to use that and then after that I'm going to hand things over to Jarrett who will give some other tips on how to discover your royal roots [Music] so we're going to start by taking a quick look at Jeannie comm if you go to that website Jeannie comm you'll land on a screen that looks like this now for this video I'm going to assume that you already know the basics of how to make a family tree and have perhaps already used a website such as ancestry or my heritage if you haven't you'll have to start building your tree from scratch and you can do that simply by adding your first name last name and email address and clicking this green button start my family tree once you do that you'll be taken to a page that looks like this and you can start by adding your father and your mother you click on that and you add as much information as you have and then you keep going you can add your grandparents your Islands your uncle's great-grandparents and so forth but this tutorial is not about how to build a family tree so I'm not going to go into all of that let's say you've already spent the time to build your family tree on Jeannie or you've built one on another website such as ancestry if you have your family tree on another website you can actually import it into Jeannie fairly easily there's a special file format called a gedcom which is used for storing family tree files if you search for help on ancestry or my heritage or whatever else you might be using you can usually find a way to export all of your information into a gedcom file once you've done that you can then use this box here click it to import all that information into Jeannie comm so let's go ahead and do that and click on start my family tree we then end up on this screen here so we first want to find that file and upload it it will take some time depending on how big it is then it wants us to choose the individual who's going to be at the bottom of the tree and all here I'll choose myself because this is my gedcom and then you want to do start import now if you already have a jeanny account and you've not yet imported your information you can find that page by going under research and then you click on gedcom and then under gedcom import here is a link to gedcom import page and it brings you back to this screen so the first thing you need to know about genie is that it's very different from other genealogy websites in that on genie everyone is generally part of one really big tree on websites such as ancestry or my heritage everybody's tree stays separate and you do your own research you can perhaps view other people's trees if they're public and you can copy that information but your work remains separate from other people's work on genie it's different it's more like Wikipedia in that once you go up a few generations and get into people that are deceased anyone can edit those profiles if they are connected to them somehow so for example let's imagine you have a great-great grandmother and someone else who's using Genie comm is also descended from that same great-great grandmother both of you will perhaps create a profile for that person with their birth dates and death dates genie will notice that and it will send a notification to both of you saying hey we think this is the same person would you like to merge these two profiles into a single profile and if you do that then you do get that single profile and now both of you are linked to the same person and the more that this happens and the more you connect to profiles that are connected to other people in common the tree gets bigger and bigger and bigger and on genie they call this the world tree and it's what Genie is all about the more connections that you can make to the world tree by merging profiles belonging to your ancestors with profiles that have also been created by other people who share that aunts in common the more connected you're going to be to that big World Tree and the more connected you are to that big world tree you connect into other people's research and therefore you have a greater chance of finding a connection to royalty so let's assume that you've entered all your information into genie comm and you've merged a bunch of profiles so that you're now well connected to the world tree once you've done all those things it's really easy to find a connection to royalty and I'm going to show you how to do that now so this is my own personal profile page the only person that can edit it is me here at the top you'll notice that there is a search bar now genie is free however some features are limited unless you pay for a pro version and I found that one of these limitations is that you can't do unlimited searches using this search bar however I found a workaround and that is you can go to Google and you can search for anyone's name I'm gonna put in William the Conqueror here and as long as you put genie calm after that person's name it will likely find the profile for that person on genie so here I've found William the Conqueror now you'll also notice that Genie calm tends to be a little bit slow so I've clicked on that and we're waiting usually takes a little bit longer than most websites but here we go we're now at the genie profile page for William the conquerer now I've chosen William the conquerer rather than Charlemagne because he's a little bit further down the line and I know that I have a lot of relatives from England and therefore I'm pretty sure I'm connected to him so we're gonna start with him you'll notice that even though I went to Google genie still remembers that I'm logged in you can tell that because here's my photo and name here you'll notice that because we're dealing with a famous historical person this page has a curator which means that there are some restriction on who can edit it curators are usually volunteers who spend a lot of time on geni so you can see here that William the Conqueror was first added to genie back in 2007 and that officially there are 999 people connected to the profile in fact it's probably much more than that but I assume there must be some sort of limit there but here's the part that I really wanted to show you once you're logged into Genie if you're looking at any profile page on the website you're always going to have a yellow box at the top and this is where you get a button that's going to say show relatives or show how I am related to this person and when we click that sometimes you have to wait a few seconds here I've already done it so it comes up right away it automatically calculates the shortest shortest path between you and the profile you're looking at so here it has calculated that William the Conqueror King of England is my 27th great-grandfather and it shows me the exact line from me to him now before you get really excited let me give you some qualifiers because at first glance this seems really easy and you might be tempted to just screencap this share it on Facebook and say look I'm related to royalty don't do that at least not yet and here's why remember how your teacher told you to never use Wikipedia as a primary source well the same goes for genie com genies main strength is that anyone can edit it but genies main weakness is that anyone can edit it so you always want to go through and check each connection carefully you can start here at the top with the famous person and you can try googling each name a lot of these people are probably going to be on Wikipedia and then once you get closer down to yourself you might want to just google those names so let me just choose somewhere here in the middle Elizabeth Wingfield I could put her name into Google and her birthday and perhaps her sorry her birthdate and her death date and see what I can find I might connect two pages on ancestry.com or other genealogical sites which might give me some little bit better information and it would just confirm that what I'm finding here is in fact true so you want to check all the connections very carefully now before we leave Gina comm let me just show you how powerful this little tool is because I imagine that a lot of you probably haven't put your information on Gina calm yet and that doesn't mean that you can't play around and figure out some pretty interesting things because what this tool here this yellow box can do it can basically show you how any two people on Gina comm are related not just you and someone else so let me quickly show you how to do that so as long as you've done that first step on Gina calm where you entered your name and email address and got an account you're going to be able to do this even if none of your family tree information is added yet so let me go to another profile for someone who is living and again I'm not going to use this bar I'm gonna go to Google instead and I'm gonna type Obama and I think Google's going to know who I'm talking about Obama Jeannie calm and there we go it found President Obama and there's a profile page for him that someone has created on Jeannie comm and note that it immediately tells me that Obama the 44th President of the USA is my 11th cousin once-removed so that's pretty cool I'm related to Obama now let's say that we want to see how Obama is related to Donald Trump hmm notice there's this little green push button here a little pin let's click that and what it does it switches it from comparing it to me it now says that relationships are now displayed relative to Barack Obama so now that we've done that lets go to google and type donald trump Jeannie dot-com and we are going to find a profile page for him that somebody has put together on Jeannie and now since we are we set things to be relative to Obama it has automatically calculated the Donald Trump the 45th president is Barack Obama the 44th presidents thirteenth cousin six times removed so look at that it seems I'm more related to Obama that Donald Trump is and then if we click on the show the relatives it's actually going to show us the exact link between those two people's so we can start with Obama and go through his mother his father and so forth all the way up to some individual and then go back down to Donald Trump so you can do this with any two people who are on Jeannie comm and a lot of famous people politicians nobles Royals etc have been added by somebody on Jeannie calm so you can use this tool to find how any two people are related on the world tree again you want to be a little bit careful with the data and check everything carefully yourself using other websites but it's a really neat feature and it's a lot of fun to use so that was a look at Jeannie comm I'm now going to hand things over to Jared who will discuss some other ways you can go about finding that connection to royalty hi everyone I am J Ross the genie vlogger as Matt mentioned you can go to Jeannie dot-com to find ways that you're connected to royal trees by going on to Jeannie comm you do need to have a family tree already built and connected into the world tree but for a lot of people they're still building their family trees and they might not have gotten to that point of being able to connect into the world tree when looking for royal lines in your family tree the first big piece to look for is coming from a culture that actually has royalty so folks who are descending from European cultures have a really good chance of finding that royal line in their family tree but let's say that you come from an Eastern European Jewish family well you're much more unlikely to find any royalty in that ancestral line so if you're trying to focus on finding royal lines you'll want to focus on your lines and your family that trace to cultures that have those royal families another big piece to consider is whether you come from an area where it was common for royalty to marry commoners often this would be a marriage between someone who is royal and a wealthy commoner but in some areas they didn't always need to be wealthy something often known as a morganatic marriage or sometimes referred to as a left-handed marriage was a marriage between somebody who was royal and someone who is not royal but that person who is not royal and any of their subsequent children wouldn't receive any of the titles so these marriages often led to children who had no nobility so they then became commoners and their children were commoners and within just a few generations it might be completely unknown that they actually descend from royal blood another piece that you need to consider if you're looking for royalty in your ancestry is that you'll need to be able to trace your family tree at least a couple hundred years back in time for most people if they descend from a royal family within the past couple hundred years there's usually some sort of story about it but not always but if you can only trace your family back a hundred years it's very unlikely that you're gonna find any royalty but if you can trace your family back five hundred years you have a lot higher of a chance of finding those royal lines just as men explained in his last video about the probabilities of being descended from royalty the further you go back the higher the likelihood that there are Royals within those older generations as you expand your family tree it really is just a matter of luck in terms of finding those royal lines they could be hiding almost anywhere now as you trace your family back further and further some other things you can look for are common surnames known to royal families depending on where you're locating your family your ancestral lines you can look up common surnames of the nobility within those areas and if you find those surnames within your own family that could be a good hint that that line might be connected to royalty another thing that you can do to help you in your search for royal ancestry is to look into the materials available through certain lineage societies that are connected to royal families there are all sorts of lineage societies some that deal with being descendant of Charlemagne others that deal with being descended from illegitimate children of Royals one which is actually called royal bastards org so there's a lot of different options in terms of getting other material and as you learn about how certain family structures happen within the different royal family trees you can get a better understanding of how your tree might be connected into those other trees and if you've done a lot of work and you still haven't found that royal connection but you really want to you can always look into help from a professional genealogist there are a lot of different genealogists who specialize in royal families so those are the ones that you want to find to help you in your research thanks Jared and thank you for watching this video if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment and we'll try to answer as many of those as possible don't forget to check out Jared's channeled link is in the description and be sure to subscribe to this channel as well thanks for watching

Channel: UsefulCharts

Views: 313,537

Rating: 4.9136763 out of 5

Keywords: geni.com tutorial, geni.com world tree, geni.com, royal ancestors, how to find royal ancestors, famous ancestors, how to find famous ancestors, royal lines family tree, royal lines ancestry, royalty ancestry, royalty family tree

Id: IOZAh2HlFzM

Length: 19min 4sec (1144 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2019