Actually, yes. As a tangent from pulling information together for my application for Canadian citizenship by descent, I went down a genealogy rabbit hole, which led to the realization that my wife and I have common ancestors - Edward I (“Longshanks”) and Eleanor of Castile.
So apparently my wife and I are 23rd cousins, twice removed.
To celebrate our consanguinity, we watched Braveheart. (Hollywood suggests that my many-great grandfather is actually William Wallace, rather than Edward I, but the pedigree books suggest that the timings just don’t work out.)
(I also have the elder and younger Robert de Brus/the Bruce in the movie in my family tree, via a different path…although I’m skeptical at one of the links necessary to get there.)
At any rate…that’s not where I picked up the primae noctis reference. I think that was probably something inspired/encountered/stolen from some comment I came across on Reddit.
I get notices from my ancestry site periodically showing that Obama, George Bush, etc., are 11th cousins. It arises through my mother’s ancestors who arrived in Boston in the 1600s. My wife’s ancestors are Russian Jews and Cherokee so she has never popped up as a cousin.
Probably the coolest thing I found in that round of the rabbit hole was: My wife grew up with a family story about one of their ancestors being “an Indian Princess”. However, genealogy has never been a big thing in her family.
So, when I went clicking back through Ancestry data, I discovered that her 11-great grandmother was the third wife of John Rolfe of Jamestown…whose second wife was Matoaka Little Snow Feather, a.k.a. Pocahontas.
Also, I’d love to know the source of some of the data in the Mormons’ database. Going back through the royalty angle…back in the fifth century, public pedigrees end with a woman who was the daughter of a Germanic chief and the last Roman procurator for the region…and then there is a not-publicly documented family tree for that Roman procurator in the Mormons’ database.
If that family tree were to be believed (and everything in the path leading to that fifth-century marriage were accurate):
My and my cousin-wife’s family tree can be traced back to the Roman Republic (Quintus Sulpicius Rufus of Rome, born circa 75 BCE).
I learned that Ancestry has issues with BC/BCE dates.
I learned that Ancestry doesn’t know how to describe relations beyond the 70th generation back.
Admittedly, I didn’t independently verify anything other than what I needed for my Canadian citizenship paperwork, and a lot of the data that I added by clicking through information aggregated in places like Ancestry is of dubious quality…but it was a fascinating way to kill time for a couple of weeks, and an excuse to read about obscure parts of European history on Wikipedia.
It’s a shame that the Mormons don’t have the same information on Vikings. A couple of times in that exercise, I could be heard to say “cool, an actual Viking!”, whereupon that line hit a brick wall of no recorded history.