ozoneocean
Product Placement
…apart from the European kings and queens.
But didn't they all marry their brothers and sister, cousins, aunts and uncles and things? o_O
That's why it's so easy to trace back their family :þ
“And here's Uncle Joey… and Great Uncle Joey… and Grandpa Joey… and other Grandpa Joey…”
“Wow… You sure have many relatives, named Joey.”
“…many?”
Salsa
Got ya beat PP, I can trace mine back almost 2000 years. Admittedly there is quite a bit of nobility in there, and a smidge of royalty.
See, that's the thing. Once you manage to tie your family to a noble tree, you gain access to a huge records of family books, making it much easier for you to look back into the past.
The olden day Icelanders had a fetish for that kind of thing. They really loved talking about who was related to whom and a common conversation starter was: “Hverra manna ert þú?” (means “Who's people are you?” ) and thus kept crazy accurate records of pretty much every great family in the country, reaching back to the settlement era. Pretty much the only people excluded from it are the occasional drifters. The cool thing is that whenever I feel like it, I can start digging into my records because it's available for me online. Sadly, none of you folk can access it, for it's for Icelanders only.
…I supposed I should end this with a really funny fact. Due to how accurate the records are and how few Icelanders there are (around 300 thousand (only 50 thousand, a century ago)), it's pretty much possible to link any two Icelanders to a common ancestor (of course, if global records were accurate enough and stretched back far enough, this would be possible to do with any human). I remember me and my buddies once trying it out and the closest relations we discovered was between me and one of my best buddy at the time, who was related to me via 12th generation. Everyone else were around 16 or 18 generations apart.
Anyways, the funny thing that I was gonna get at was that when people around here start dating/sleeping with each other, one of the first thing they tend to do is to sneak into the good book and look up how closely related they are. If it's closer then 5 generations, then it usually creeps them out enough to break it up. A punch worthy insult is to call an Icelander inbred. A fun tip for those who really want to piss them off.