Talk:Most royal candidate theory

Factual
Let's try to make this factual:
 * 1) Harold Brooks-Baker was never editor of Burke's Peerage. Simple fact. And he didn't claim to be. What he did was to point out his (nebulous) affiliation with a company purchased from Burke's, and having "Burke's" in its title, and let people assume he was an editor of Burke's Peerage. Burke's 106th edition's preface takes no little trouble to dissociate the name of Burke's Peerage from that of Brooks-Baker.
 * 2) the proposition is demonstrably false, not "brought into question".
 * 3) "The apparent defense against this charge is simply that he who ultimately won is the one most royal.": but that's not what the "theory" says. And who made this "apparent" defense?
 * 4) in fact, it's ludicrous on its face, as no quantitation of "royalness" or even definition of that is associated with it.
 * 5) "Burke never proposed that there was some LaRouchesque conspiracy to fix the Presidential election through secret acts of succession.": why should this be included. There are lots of things Brooks-Baker never proposed. (Burke never proposed anything remotely like this.
 * 6) one could easily make a case that Bush was more royal than Kerry, so 2004 is not "indisputably" an exception. (For that matter, you could make a case that Kerry "won", not that even that would salvage this press-release-masquerading-as-a-serious-theory. - Nunh-huh 06:23, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Pertinent portions of Brooks-Baker's Telegraph obit:

"Harold Brooks-Baker, who died on Saturday aged 71, was a self-appointed authority on all matters royal: his great advantage for journalists was that he was always available to make an arresting comment; his disadvantage was that he was often wrong.

"He and some associates acquired the rights to a series of spin-off books published by Burke's, Debrett's rival, but not its famous Peerage. Never the less a photograph of him holding a volume was often published. This venture, too, went into liquidation, and he next went in for marketing Scottish feudal baronies. Despite his carefully burnished image, he wrote little, apart from a few book reviews, and edited no books."

"If the tabloids and television continued to quote him, serious newspapers were careful to refer to him as head of Burke's Marketing Limited."


 * Yes, the Telegraph was pretty anti-Baker...that doesn't prove them to be an objective source.


 * And the point of the double elections was around for years while Baker continued to espouse the point, so it would make more sense to clarify the definition of the theory than to declare it "disproven" wholesale. What we have here is an obsessive PoV issue on your part with the article, and you're letting your rabid emotion bleed into it when you insist on using such biased wording and stating false absolutes, instead of keeping an NPoV tone in the article. Kaz 18:06, 3 January 2006 (UTC)


 * If you believe Brooks-Baker edited Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, you're simply wrong. And don't make arguments on Brooks-Baker's behalf that he never made. If you can document that he said "only the last election counts", put it back in the article. Otherwise, it doesn't belong there. - Nunh-huh 02:03, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

I'd be interested to know if the more royal candidate is more likely to win, which can be established with high-school statistics and a lot of research. Has anyone reputable looked into this? - Miles Gould, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
 * No, probably because the reputable ones recognize that any operational definition of "more royal" is fairly arbitrary and could be manipulated to produce any results desired. One might define the "more royal" candidate as the one with the largest number of descents from royalty, the most recent royal ancestor (by generation, or by time), the soundest genealogical line to royalty, the greatest number of royally-descended immigrant ancestors, the largest number of grandparents with royal descent, the largest number of greatgrandparents with royal descent, etc. on up the generational chain, or any number of other ways. And for many presidents any of these operational definitions would have to be reckoned as "undefined", because their ancestry is not sufficiently well-known. The "theory" is pretty much something Brooks-Baker made up so he'd have something to issue press releases about, rather than a serious hypothesis. - Nunh-huh 16:18, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Andrew Jackson's royal ancestry?
"Jackson has no known royal descent (in fact, has no known ancestry beyond his great-grandparents!)" This family tree at Rootsweb.com would seem to contradict that statement. If you go further back by clicking on John Vance, then Joanna Montgomery, and then Alexander, it seems that Jackson not only has more known ancestry than three generations back, but that he in fact does have royal ancestry. Does anyone have a more authoritative source like one of Gary Boyd Roberts' books? --Michael WhiteT&middot;C 00:48, 31 December 2006 (UTC) No known ancestors beyond Kekule #8. And the ancestors given differ from those in the tree you cite, and do not include any Vances. - Nunh-huh 01:23, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Never trust a Rootweb family tree. Gary Boyd Robert's Ancestors of American Presidents, p. 12, lists only 6 ancestors of Jackson.

NEVER trust a Wikipedia article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.181.115.229 (talk) 01:53, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Every USA President is related except one
There's a Quora question that display the research of a 12 years old demonstrating that all, save one, of USA presidents are related to John "Lackland", King of England. The comments there do demonstrate that it's not such a big deal. Ronbarak (talk) 16:44, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Rewrite
I've taken the liberty of completely rewriting this page, to bring it more in line with Wikipedia's rules on NPOV and 'fringe' articles. The purpose of Wikipedia is not to prove or disprove a theory, and it's not the place for original research. I've kept the article brief, because there's not a lot to say. Personally, I'm not sure this theory warrants an article at all, but it looks like that discussion's already taken place (albeit years ago). DoctorKubla (talk) 21:09, 28 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I'd like to see a citation for your claim that Brooks-Baker said that "every U.S. president since George Washington can have their bloodline traced back to various European royals". The purpose of Wikipedia, as per our rules on NPOV and fringe beliefs, is to give due weight, not undue weight, to fringe theories, and since this one is clearly disproven by counterexample, it is our policy to state that it is disproven. We don't present an ersatz debate between believers and "critics"; rather we state the belief and detail its errors. - Nunh-huh 21:35, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't think that is our policy. Granted, I'm new at this, but if you look at other articles such as the moon landing conspiracy theory, the articles never states that the theory is untrue, only that most people believe it to be untrue for various comprehensively-cited reasons. The problem with the most royal candidate thing is that it just isn't notable enough to find reliable sources. The only notable proponents are Harold Brooks-Baker, whose claims are only documented on unreliable websites, and David Icke, who also believes that we are ruled by reptilian alien overlords. Furthermore, I can't find anyone who has even gone to the effort of debunking the theory, since anyone with any common sense can see that it's nonsense. The article is technically still original research, which is still in violation of policy, but it's the best I can do. Unless you can find some better sources yourself, the whole thing will most likely be marked for deletion. DoctorKubla (talk) 09:54, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I think a more suitable comparison would be the flat-earth "theory" or AIDS denialism. We certainly don't entertain the notion that it is a possibility that the AIDS denialists are right. Brooks-Bakers' claims were reported on in the American media every 4 years, as he opined for the cameras, and such reports would be reliable sources. As for deletion, go for it if you wish; it survived the previous attempt. - Nunh-huh 16:11, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The scientific community considers the evidence that HIV causes AIDS to be conclusive and rejects AIDS-denialist claims as pseudoscience. Not "this definitely isn't true", but "scientists consider it untrue". Anyway, I don't care enough about this to mark it for deletion, I'm just saying someone else surely will. DoctorKubla (talk) 16:33, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

"So what"
This article reads to state that Brooks-Baker's predictions were incorrect only once after long consecutive period of accuracy.

99.231.6.129 (talk) 07:36, 1 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Except it wasn't. First, a he claims royal descents that just don't exist - they are based on old tratitions and invented pedigrees, not authentic genealogy.  By picking the ones he wanted to believe, he begged the question.  Having arbitrarily accepted the better bogus descent for the winning candidate, it is no surprise that the winning candidates ended up with the better bogus descents.  Except they didn't. In the second US election, John Adams beat Thomas Jefferson.  In the next, Thomas Jefferson beat John Adams.  What, did Jefferson go and change his ancestry in between?  In 1824, John Q Adams beat Andrew Jackson; in 1828, Jackson beat Adams.  In 1836 Van Buren beat W H Harrison, in 1840 Harrison topped Van Buren.  1888 B Harrison over Cleveland; 1892 Cleveland over Harrison.  Simply put, it was all a publicity stunt, and neither reflected authentic genealogy nor authentic presidential history. Agricolae (talk) 01:08, 20 April 2017 (UTC)


 * A bit of a bump here, don't you think? The original comment was almost two years ago by an IP editor who's very unlikely to read this.  I tend to agree that many of the supposed royal genealogies are likely to be exposed as wishful thinking and outright invention, but some are almost certainly accurate.  Unfortunately, there's no scholarly analysis of the claim that I know of, so that's really just speculation.  I've been tempted to try and do the work myself, but it'd be a huge endeavour to determine the factual accuracy of pedigrees that we don't even have available to scrutinize, and even if I could do it, it'd constitute "original research" if it didn't come from a reliable source.  Which is also a potential problem with the paragraph you added today.  It's true that even simple logic would show these to be potential exceptions to the theory, which is why I'm inclined to leave it, but it's very close to original research if you can't find a reliable source, and other editors might not be quite as lenient in this case.  We also don't know what Baker said about these years; surely they must have been pointed out to him.  It might seem rather silly if it turns out that the actual formulation of the theory accounted for this, and we just didn't know that.  If you can find any reliable sources for this stuff, it'd be a big improvement.  P Aculeius (talk) 03:24, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
 * He didn't have an actual formulation of the theory - it was all a publicity stunt. Every election, after the media desceded into the doldrums of the campaigns and were looking for anything new or interesting, he would come out with this press release, and they would jump on it.  He never published anything himself beyond these press releases that made the bold, general, unsupported claim to the pattern existing.  The press just parroted the claim uncritically, because of the novelty factor.  Further, the process of genealogy is still haunted by its 'ancestor-collector' aspects.  Scholarly genealogists have studied the ancestry of the presidents and many have no identifiable royal descents at all, but that didn't stop people from inventing connections or drawing unsupported connections, and these get spread around liberally, so there are a lot of options out there if you want to conclude just about anything about presidential genealogy.  You can't very well get the press to report that their quirky feel-good story was based on bad genealogy, because that is uninteresting.  (For that matter, the same thing applies to the 12-year-old's King John descent finding - I don't doubt that she found such descents for the presidents among the miriad on-line pedigrees that contaminate the internet, but I do doubt that they are all accepted by scholarly genealogists, and more importantly, the press won't care because it would just mess up their feel-good story, so they may have someone comment that it is not surprising that they all descend from King John, but they won't get into the nuts and bolts of reporting that the descent of Andrew Jackson from King John is based on a made-up genealogy.)  This is all WP:FRINGE, and with such material, it is always a challenge to address patently false claims that the relevant scholarly community can't be bothered to address in print. Agricolae (talk) 13:37, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I completely concur in your reasoning, but it's still your opinion unless you can find some reliable source that says that the theory was never committed to paper, or had no meticulous research behind it, or that many of the alleged descents are discounted by modern genealogists. Is it a "fringe" theory?  That depends on what you define as "fringe", and when something has been repeated continuously and is widely and largely uncritically accepted as fact, it's hard to argue that it's a "fringe" theory, even if it seems rather obviously improbable to those of us with genealogical experience.  We can't cite our own knowledge and experience, and we can't substitute our opinion for that of published sources.  It would be lovely to explode this theory, but neither you nor I is qualified to do it based on suspicion, probability, statistics, or anything other than published material in reliable sources.  What it takes to keep this from being reverted as "original research" is a published source that says some of what you want to say about it.  P Aculeius (talk) 18:34, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Erroneous lede
The current topic sentence here is just plain false. The "most royal candidate theory" is not the theory stated in the lede; it's the theory that the candidate with the most royal descent wins. Somehow this accurate statement of what the theory contends has been edited out of the article and replaced by some other theory. Also gone: all the references and citations to Brook-Baker, the main proponent of the theory until his death. - Nunh-huh 19:20, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Martin Van Buren
https://www.geni.com/path/Martin-Van-Buren-8th-President-of-the-USA+is+related+to+Edward-I-Longshanks-King-of-England?from=353493399110004524&to=6000000000614910056 Here's a link showing that indeed, Martin Van Buren is a descendant of King John. This line goes to Edward I, who through his father Henry III, is the grandson of King John. His is also descended from him through a couple other lines as well. 67.118.201.15 (talk) 21:53, 22 August 2016 (UTC)


 * This is someone's family tree, uploaded without source or any indication of scholarly authority. It's not a valid source for Wikipedia.  Chances are pretty good that there are some hypothetical connections in there inserted by someone who really wanted it to be true.  But even if it's true, we can't possibly use it as a source for this article, or assert the claims in it.  It's not part of the theory that the article is about; it wasn't claimed by the people discussed in the article; and it doesn't have a verifiable source.  This article isn't really about proving or disproving the theory or extending it; it's about a notable claim (the fact that it surfaced in the news repeatedly over decades is what made it notable, not its accuracy).  P Aculeius (talk) 03:14, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

Opinion of some teenager
Just because on a slow news day a newspaper happened to report some random teenager  's personal opinion does not make it noteworthy or relevant. To demand that genealogical scholars refute some teenager  is really putting the burden of proof entirely on the wrong side. Agricolae (talk) 07:23, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
 * She wasn't even a teenager - she was 12, apparently. And the Mail is not a WP:RS.   Ghmyrtle (talk) 09:00, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
 * The age of the person making a claim isn't really relevant to the fact that the claim was made—and deemed newsworthy. The Mail is a perfectly good source for the fact that the claim was made.  And if you wanted you could find it in numerous other sources.  The claim was made, and arguments about whether it's correct do nothing to refute that.  And you can't argue with the accuracy of the claim unless you can find a reliable source that states it's inaccurate.  I've looked, and have yet to find a scholarly review of the claim—perhaps because it was never published as a scholarly article.  Please don't misunderstand me: I don't believe that a twelve-year-old is a qualified professional genealogist capable of uncovering hidden lines of ancestry that have somehow eluded experienced researchers for years.  I highly doubt that many of the supposed lines of descent from King John can be proved to a high degree of probability.  But in Wikipedia, all that we can do is report what reliable sources say.  We have reliable sources for the fact that this claim was made, and it received considerable publicity.  It's perfectly relevant to this article.  We don't have any reliable sources discrediting the claim.  Can you find some?  Please, by all means, look.  I would be delighted if there were some decent research addressing the claim.  But until it's found, there's nothing to dispute the claim other than the opinions of Wikipedia editors, and Wikipedians are not the arbiters of truth.  P Aculeius (talk) 13:57, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
 * The Mail isn't reporting and vetting the accuracy of the claim, it is (credulously) reporting that the claim has been made, by someone with no particular expertise. The age is relevant - we can as editors conclude this 'look what the precocious 12-year-old has done' story doesn't represent a noteworthy addition, a representation of scholarly consensus on the Most Royal Candidate Theory that must be included in the article and can only be questioned via a published explicit refutation. Agricolae (talk) 15:32, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Again, it's not our job to decide whether the claim appearing in the news media is true or false. For that matter, the news media didn't claim she was right, although it was still reported as fact, rather than a wildly-improbable claim.  The bottom line, however, is that it was reported, it has a bearing on this article, and we can't dismiss it scoffingly just because we doubt that a twelve-year-old is competent to make such a discovery.  Find a reliable source that says she's wrong.  P Aculeius (talk) 17:14, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Again, it is our job to decide if it is relevant, noteworthy and reliable. Not everything in a newspaper is worth mentioning, and a public interest story on a the personal genealogy project of a 12-year-old that doesn't even mention the fringe theory that is the topic of the article fails on several levels.  It is entirely appropriate to question the competence of a 12-year-old if we are going to report her 'findings' as relevant.  To demand that experts waste their time refuting a 12-year-old or it must be presented as relevant fact is way wide of the mark. Agricolae (talk) 17:29, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Regardless of whether the claim is true or false, the fact that the Mail (and/or anyone else) reported it doesn't mean that it is worthy of inclusion in the article. Verifiability does not guarantee inclusion. I don't think this information improves the article in any way: it is trivia and only (very) tangentially related to the theory (e.g., it doesn't make any statements about the losing candidates...what if they all were related to King John?). There's no analysis at all, just a statement of trivial fact. Honestly it strikes me as something I would expect to see in a middle-school history class presentation, not an encyclopedia article.  C Thomas3   (talk) 17:34, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
 * I've removed it as WP:UNDUE. It's mentioned in three books - all self-published. Nothing in Google Scholar It looks like the story started in 2010 and was later picked up by the Daily Mail, which loves that sort of thing - they like stories about Atlantis also. It just isn't significant enough.  Doug Weller  talk 13:20, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

I did some digging and found a post on Wikitree about this meme which lead to a page  that uses their database to calculate the relationships between the Presidents and King John. Unsurprisingly, in addition to Martin Van Buren; James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, William McKinley Jr., Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan showed as having no direct relationships to John; and some like Abraham Lincoln being connected to John through his father Henry II. -- Auric   talk  20:09, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
 * But then Wikitree is not exactly renowned for its accuracy (though it is more likely to give erroneous royal descents than to leave out authentic ones). Agricolae (talk) 21:17, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Can you show me some proof of this? -- Auric   talk  18:11, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Some proof of what? that Wikitree isn't known for its accuracy?  How about this - show me some scholar praising Wikitree for its accuracy rather than asking me to prove the negative.  I could show you a descent that is seven generations long, and every single generation is in error.  All crowd-sourced online genealogy is entirely unreliable - this doesn't mean it is all inaccurate, but it is all unreliable because it is so rife with inaccuracies that nothing you find deserves the benefit of the doubt.  Or did you mean the comment about Type I vs Type II errors?  Crowdsourcing tends to do a good job of accumulating the information that is out there, whether it is authentic information or not, but it doesn't do a good job of critical evaluation, so they are likewise likely to include any and all of the innumerable bogus royal descents that have been accumulating within the genealogical community for generations.  Agricolae (talk) 09:34, 12 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Not sure we're in disagreement here. Auric was pointing out that WikiTree doesn't support the claims being made.  Although I quite agree, no crowdsourced family tree can ever be considered a reliable source for proving someone's descent.  What would probably count as a reliable source would be the book cited in this article—if the citation hasn't been deleted, if it has, then check back a couple of weeks; I was going to check it at the library, but I haven't had time yet—on the ancestry of American presidents.  It wouldn't be conclusive in the sense that it completely disproves the claim we're still arguing over, but it would be strong evidence to the contrary, at least in cases where no such ancestry could be authenticated by the author and sources he considered to be reliable.  P Aculeius (talk) 13:44, 12 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I was simply pointing out that using a non-RS to disprove something is not the strongest argument (even if I fully agree with the general conclusions). There was only one citation deleted from the analysis of her conclusions, along with the Daily Mail one reporting the original story, and it was to geni.com, another crowdsourced online genealogical collection, and equally worthless.  In addition, while ostensibly using a bad source to criticize the one time she couldn't find a descent while saying nothing of the 43 times she found royal descents (including false ones, which is where the real problem lies), it has the counterintuitive effect of supporting her overall conclusions more than it faults them.  (There was also a blog post by 'just a guy on the internet' (not an expert), in a different section that was not talking specifically about her theory and was just using statistical generalities about royal descents, not addressing the flaws in the tweenager's actual genealogical conclusions.) This is no sort of contradiction. Agricolae (talk) 16:23, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Proposal to merge into Harold Brooks-Baker
Should this article be [s]merged to ? Guy (help!) 17:26, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

Opinions

 * Support as proposer. This article appears to be largely about Brooks-Baker's credibility. The sources are mainly about him (e.g. obituaries) and the ones which are not about him, quote him. This is not a notable theory. Guy (help!) 17:26, 8 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Support. The so-called theory is really nothing but a manifestation of Brooks-Baker's self-promotion.  When topics are so inextricably-linked, it is often better to cover them together. Agricolae (talk) 18:07, 8 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Oppose. In addition to this being a popular topic of discussion around election season, and a topic larger than its most famous proponent (which was more apparent before recent deletions) it's simply better known than he is.  A quick check on pageviews shows that this article has gotten around twenty times the average daily traffic that Brooks-Baker's own article has over the course of the last ninety days: an average of six views for Brooks-Baker, and just short of a hundred and twenty here.  If the articles were to be merged, then Brooks-Baker would have to be merged into this article, not the other way around.  But that wouldn't be appropriate, since he's a notable person in his own right, and most of the material in his article would be out of place here.  So the two articles should remain separate.  P Aculeius (talk) 18:43, 8 September 2019 (UTC)
 * The "recent deletions" appear to have been a valid response to terrible sourcing, though. Guy (help!) 16:21, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Not really relevant to whether this article should be merged into Brooks-Baker, however. And I note that the material was deleted because it was deemed undue weight, owing to the lack of credentials and published documentation about the claim, not because reliable sources didn't support the fact that someone made the claim.  For the fact that the claim was made, the sources were fine; we're just all very skeptical about the substance of that claim.  However, since countless people know about it, I would have preferred to find some material to refute it, rather than simply deleting it and pretending we don't know anything about it.  P Aculeius (talk) 17:05, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
 * The editor who did the deletion did indeed make disfavorable comments about the quality of the source . Experts don't waste time refuting a 12-year-old's personal genealogy project, so there is not going to be a source directly refuting the claim.  Given that the whole thing made no mention whatsoever about the 'most royal candidate theory' - this is not a WP:COATRACK for anything having to do with royal descents of presidents, it is specifically about Brooks-Baker's so-called 'theory' - deletion was entirely proper. Agricolae (talk) 17:46, 11 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Oppose I agree with Aculeius, the theory is betther known than its individual proponents. Dimadick (talk) 19:11, 8 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I am not sure this is the case globally. In Britain he was probably more frequently quoted for his 'the Queen descends from Muhammad' self-promotion than he was for the 'most royal candidate' one. Agricolae (talk) 16:58, 11 September 2019 (UTC)


 * WP:RFCNOT. Please observe the directions at WP:MERGE. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 19:45, 8 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delisting per RFCNOT. The question is still a valid one, just not an RFC.  We can keep discussing it here; feel free to ping editors who might be interested in this discussion.  P Aculeius (talk) 01:51, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

POV: Past Tense
User Agricolae keeps insisting that this theory exists only in the past, repeatedly revising the lead to say that it "was" rather than "is" a theory, proposition, or whatever he wants to call it. An idea remains an idea no matter whether its most vocal proponent is alive or dead or has disavowed it, and therefore needs to be referred to in the present tense, not the past. Insisting that it is no longer a theory now that what's-his-name is dead is not only factually wrong, but it takes a position on whether the theory is valid, which IMO violates WP:NPOV. Just to be clear, I'm not advocating the theory; I think it's ridiculous, except to the extent that people with more privileged backgrounds are likely to have some advantage over those with less privileged backgrounds, and that there could be some tenuous, indirect—and likely unproveable—connection between having a lot of ancestors who were part of the medieval aristocracy, and coming from a modern background of wealth and privilege. But absurd or not, the description in Wikipedia needs to state facts, not take sides; implying that the theory is dead and buried along with its most famous proponent is not neutral. P Aculeius (talk) 20:03, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * This is exactly backwards. Can theories be past tense? yes.  We use the formulation "was a theory" for a wide range of theories: social fascism, peaceful coexistence, domino theory, the theory of heat, etc.  Introducing validity into this is a red herring.  Forget 'most vocal' proponent, there is no cited source that indicates there was ever any other proponent - it was no scholarly or popular movement, just one person making press-releases that got reported by the media.  If there is no indication that it is present tense, that there are current advocates, then all we actually know, based on reliable sources, is from the past, and that makes it POV to suggest it is present tense, suggesting there are still advocates. Anyhow, the current formulation does not characterize the theory as present or past tense, it only places in the past the fact that B-B proposed it, which is neither inaccurate nor POV. Agricolae (talk) 22:24, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * That's just the point: a theory doesn't stop being a theory just because its proponent dies. You seem to be arguing that it does if nobody else subscribes to it—but you can't even prove that; you're just asserting without evidence that nobody else ever believed it, and that therefore, once the proponent dies, it stops being a theory.  But it does not matter how many people subscribe to it, or did in the past.  It's still a theory.  Present tense.  It has not kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the choir invisible.  It did not become an "ex-theory" by virtue of Brooks-Baker pushing up the daisies.  You can make all the claims you want about it being a denizen of the lunatic fringe, as long as they're supported by some kind of reliable source; but you can't assert that it ceased to be a theory at some time in the past, because that's not how ideas work.  P Aculeius (talk) 23:05, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Again, you are putting the burden on the wrong side - you are suggesting that we assume it is an active theory unless I prove the negative. Wikipedia does not work on the basis of accepting something as true unless it can be proven false, but the opposite - without any sources that anyone else believed it, we should not pretend this is the case.  With no cited source in the article that indicates there were other proponents, we only have evidence that one person ever believed it, and that person doesn't believe it (or anything else) anymore.  Again, though, the current formulation of the page refers to the theory neither as past nor present tense, only as something that B-B proposed in the past, which is unquestionably true. Agricolae (talk) 23:28, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * No, you're asserting that it's not still a theory, because nobody believes it anymore. You can't prove that, and even if you could it wouldn't affect its status as a theory in the present tense. I don't have to prove that anyone believes in it—I don't even care whether anybody does.  It still doesn't shift the theory into the past tense—a better argument might be that the theory has been disproven, but many people believe in disproven theories, so that probably doesn't help either.  And you can't claim that it's been disproven—only that there are arguments to the contrary.  A theory doesn't need to be endorsed by experts or accepted by a certain percentage of people in order to be a theory; and it's not necessary—or possible—to determine how many people believe it.  Unless you can show that nobody believes in it, you can't say that people used to believe it—and that's what placing it in the past tense does.  P Aculeius (talk) 23:39, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I had typed a longer response but there is no point. The current formulation does not characterize it either as past or present tense, so there is no point in arguing over something that is moot. Agricolae (talk) 23:58, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

1988 NYT article
I came across the following 1988 article from The New York Times, which could provide information for this article:



Vice President Bush may be narrowly trailing Gov. Michael S. Dukakis in the opinion polls, but he is far ahead according to another indicator of Presidential prospects: the royalty factor. Going by the statistics of the past, Mr. Bush will be the next President of the United States, said Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke's Peerage Ltd., the 162-year-old directory of British nobility.

Burke's Peerage today released a report tracing the Vice President's family tree to the 1400's. The study by Burke's senior genealogist, Roger Powell, and an American colleague, William Ward, found that Mr. Bush has more connections to British and European royalty than any President of the United States. Queen's 13th Cousin

For example, Mr. Bush is a 13th cousin of Queen Elizabeth II and is related to all members of the British royal family, according to Burke's genealogists. Moreover, he is related to all those who have married into the British royal family, like the Queen Mother, the Princess of Wales and the Duchess of York. Mr. Bush is also related to all current European monarchs on or off the throne, including the King of Albania.

To the unenlightened, this lofty lineage may seem worlds apart from the back-slapping, baby-kissing spectacle of American Presidential races. But the royalty factor cannot be easily disregarded, if the past is any guide, Burke's officials say. Of the 40 American Presidents, 13 have had a direct connection to European royalty.

The frequency with which royal blood has found its way into the White House is much higher than the share of the American population with links to British or European monarchs, which is estimated at less than 5 percent. In short, American Presidents have been at least six times more likely to have royal blood than the people who elected them.

The royalty factor, Mr. Brooks-Baker suggests, is a genetic phenomenon. The genes or chromosomes for leaders come forward whether it's kings or presidents, he said. You cannot hold back the genes.

In the case of the Vice President's genes, Burke's Peerage traced the Bush family tree to the 1400's. Mr. Bush is a direct descendant of King Henry VII, of one of Charles II's mistresses and of Henry VIII's younger sister, Mary, who married King Louis XII of France.

Charles II's mistress Barbara Villiers lived from 1641 to 1706 and was a sixth cousin of the Vice President's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Wellington Fay, Mr. Brooks-Baker said.

Miss Villiers's liaison with the King lasted 12 years and she had seven children, of whom only five were publicy acknowledged as his. Mr. Bush's American roots were planted by Dr. Richard Palgrave, his grandfather seven times removed, who came to America in 1630, Mr. Brooks-Baker said. According to Burke's, which has traced the genealogy of American Presidential families for years, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams were all related to Edward I. In the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt were descended from Dutch nobility. Jimmy Carter has kinship ties to noble Scottish and English families, while President Reagan is a direct descendant of the 11th-century High King of Ireland, Brian Boru. If elected, Mr. Bush would be the most royal of any American president. For now, that distinction belongs to George Washington. 'Typical Yankee Family'

In the past, Burke's has published its genealogical reports on American politicians after they are elected President. But, Mr. Brooks-Baker said, the Vice President comes from a typical old Yankee family, which promised several royal links, so the interest of the Burke's genealogists was piqued and they went ahead before the election.

Burke's has not yet done a genealogical study of the Dukakis family tree. However, Mr. Brooks-Baker is dubious about finding anything to rival the Bush wealth of royal connections. The son of a Greek immigrant - the chance of getting very far with him is remote, he said. Poor George, said Kevin Phillips, a Republican political analyst. For an American politician trying to increase his popularity with the American public, it can't be too helpful to have the issue of royal lineage raised.

Cheers. Drdpw (talk) 18:57, 2 June 2020 (UTC)