Surprise, surprise: Eugenie Bouchard related to royalty

The latest Ancestry.ca press release tells those in extreme desperation for celebrity news that Canadian tennis player, Wimbledon finalist in 2014, Eugenie Bouchard is half 11th cousin, twice removed from The Duchess of Cornwall through her father’s side of the family, a Quebec line.

In a world with three children per couple everyone would have 725.6 million 11th cousins.  That's a reasonable historical estimate as more than two children surviving to have children of their own are needed for there to have been any natural growth in population, The figure is based on the equation for the number of  nth cousins 2^(n+1)*c^n where c is the constant number of children per couple.

Estimates are there are 360 million people speaking English as their first language, and 80 million French speakers, in total much less than 725.6 million. With those odds the surprise would be if Bouchard were not related to royalty, and the same for us all.

What's more unusual in Bouchard's case is the ability to find the records thanks to those of Quebec and the British nobility having better survival than for the average British ag lab. Lesley Anderson discusses the records in an Ancestry blog post at http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2015/06/26/true-tennis-royalty-eugenie-bouchards-real-life-regal-connections-revealed/.