I don't know lots of about the history of the royals, but bloody hell they got around. Any idea when the royal ancestors came to power after the Roman empire? I have heard there had been a lot of inbreeding. Is this true?
It can be easy to trace them via their houses.
If you were to trace all the ancestors it would be a long mess, but ultimately when you go through the tree(s), you encounter almost every house in today's existence. Sometimes they say "house of X died out because of lack of descendants", but then you see that other branches have formed new houses (cadet houses/branches), so there are living descendants, just not from the last official heir (and females were often not counted in).
The easiest and quickest, really, is to go to whomever you're interested in and click on the family name ("house of"), which gives many pointers.
Ultimately, you could almost say that either a person or a house (even if the name changed over time) has been in power since frikkin forever.
And then don't forget that most if not all Europeans are either direct descendants of Charlemagne or relatives.
Eg the ancient house of Capet is technically dead, but they spawned the Bourbons (amongst others), whose members are in almost all the currently ruling houses of Europe. The house of Hanover is also linked to the Capetians, who came from the Robertians and the Carolingians ran concurrently and these families were spawns of the Roman Empire.
The Habsburgs, Romanovs, Savoys and and and and are all inter-related and can trace their ancestry to some previous, ancient "dead" house.
And that's just the main lines (heirs).
Commoners and royals share the same ancestry, main heir survives, the rest fends for themselves.
Heirs inherit, spares and illegitimate kids become the aristocracy, then that dillutes into the gentry and that dilutes into "common folk" (not all kids can be heirs and spares) and from all these you can pick a person each and then you can easily find a common ancestor (a ruler).
The Roman Empire ran also throughout this time until the fall in the 15th century.
Eg Charlemagne split his empire amongst his sons, which is what led to the split and fall of the empire, but what also helped then spawn more houses.
Sometimes you come across one of these ancient, now dead houses, but at the end it says "descendants are amongst others" and there's a list of virtually every ruling house in today's existence plus some ex-royals and now defunct houses mentioned (which still carry on with titles, daft gits), so that gives you quite an idea just how long they have ruled (since forever) and how many descendants there are (everyone's a descendant who breathes or ever breathed) and where they have and still do rule (everywhere is the answer).
The most recent common ancestor of almost every still going ruling house are Victoria (Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, but a Hanoverian spawn, which go back to the Bourbons which go back to the Capetians etc) and Christian of Denmark (Glucksburg, which is also Phil's ancestor and birth house till he took on "Mountbatten").
This is a very simplified, abridged version written by a dummy (me, in case that wasn't clear
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