For anyone who didn't see Greg's brilliant response on the now deleted thread, I've copied the statistical bit of it here:
" You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 2G Grandparents, 16 3G Grandparents, 32 4G Grandparents, 64 5G Grandparents, 128 6G Grandparents, 256 7G Grandparents, etc. Extrapolate that out to 25 generations, which will take you to about the middle of the feudal period, and you have a grand total of 69,468,882 direct ancestors. Odds are pretty good that at least one of these ancestors of yours was a royal."
It's a shame that I can't copy in the complete message. A real gem !
JC