Royal descent

[1] Historically, pretenders, impostors and those hoping to improve their social status have often claimed royal descent; some have used fabricated lineages.

[3] Logically, for every royal in a person's family tree, there is bound to be a virtually unlimited number of individuals whose births, deaths and lives went completely unrecorded by history.

That is, those of royal descent excel (to wit, Roberts' article on eminent descendants of Mrs. Alice Freeman Thompson Parke).

[11] Due to primogeniture, many colonists of high social status were younger children of English aristocratic families who came to America looking for land because, given their birth order, they could not inherit.

There were at least 650 colonists with traceable royal ancestry,[12][13] and 387 of them left descendants in America (almost always numbering many thousands, and some as many as one million).

[12] Several families which settled in those states, over the two hundred years or more since the colonial land grants, intertwined their branches to the point that almost everyone was somehow related to everyone else.

Royal descent plays an important role in many African societies; authority and property tend to be lineally derived.

[15] Oral history would be the primary method of transmitting genealogies, and both nobles and commoners base their status on descent.

In India, Pakistan, Bengal (Bangladesh), Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea and China, such lines are sometimes revered, even if there were no special merit attached to it.

Bhutan, Cambodia, Thailand and Japan still maintain their monarchies ruled by royal or imperial dynasties.

Between 1903 and 1911, the genealogist Melville Henry Massue produced volumes titled The Blood Royal of Britain - which attempted to name all the then-living descendants of King Edward III of England (1312–1377) - were published.