It's worth remembering that there's every chance that many people in
this country, who are not descended from immigrants, are related to
Egbert of Wessex. We each have two parents, four grandparents, eight
greatgrandparents and so on, doubling in each generation. Go back ten
generations and there are 1056 'parents' in that rank, another ten
generations and it's more than a million! At that rate, we each have
more than two trillion 'parents' in our 41st generation (more than two
million million). Clearly, it's not possible that they were all
separate individuals: there must be a huge amount of duplication. We are
probably all related to each other!
The new baby is lucky in some respects that he can prove that he is
descended from Egbert of Wessex; we've probably most of us got some
royal blood as well, but we can't prove it. But think on this: the baby
will be denied the great pleasure of tracing his ancestry for himself,
whereas i have had the pleasure of a fascinating hobby for the last
thirty years. I've been lucky enough to trace several of my lines back
to the middle of the sixteenth century, when parish records began. No
royal blood as yet, but one direct ancestor who was falconer to Napoleon
Buonaparte. I should hate to have had all of that done for me!