Now that we have solidly established that the emperor Charlemagne is an ancestor of both the Larson’s and the Myers’, it opens up a rapidly branching path reaching back many more centuries – in some cases beyond the “B.C. Barrier.”
As I argued earlier, it is not surprising that nearly everyone who can trace their genealogy back to the middle ages will at some point get into royalty, and that will likely lead them to Charlemagne. The sheer number of ancestors is overwhelming. At the time of Charlemagne (742-814 CE), each person on earth today must have, mathematically, 68,719,476,736 – 36th great-grandfathers! No more and no less. Hundreds of times the earth’s entire population in that period. One of them almost has to be Charlemagne. Still, following the threads is a lot of fun.
Charlemagne himself was a big genealogy nut, and worked hard at documenting his ancestry. Combine that with the fact that he is an ancestor of so many modern genealogists, and there is huge information on his pedigree, back a long, long way. It is true that in pre-Christian Europe, even the kings were mostly illiterate, their history propagated by oral tradition for centuries before it was formally documented. Even so, the consensus between researchers is quite strong along many of the blood lines. Stay tuned for some really, really OLD news!