An Indepth Look into Imbreeding

One thing that I have found interesting about the Swedish Royal Family is that the Royal House of Bernadotte is actually French. This left me wondering, just how Swedish is the Swedish Royal Family. Using Wikipedia to find lineage going back 10 generations and some rough guesses, I've determined that King Carl XVI is only 0.1% Swedish.

The break down is this:

Swedish	0.1%
Danish	0.1%
Russian	0.2%
French	4.9%
German	94.7%

I was expecting French to be much more prevalent given the history of Sweden, but apparently the fact that Germany didn't unify until the 19th Century left a rather large pool of noble families to marry into. It appears that between 17th and 19th Century Germany's largest export was spouses. Turns out Catherine the Great was a German princess, I had no idea. The Russian blood in the Swedish Royal Family came from Catherine's husband, Peter III. Intriguingly, he's also the source of the Swedish blood in the Swedish Royal Family. He was also deranged.

However, I think the greatest part of this little study was the prevalence of imbreeding. In King Carl's family tree, Queen Victoria (House of Hannover, go figure) shows up twice, Francis Frederick Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld 4 times, Ferdinand Albert II Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg three times, and King George I of Britain (he was German) shows up an astonishing 6 times. King Carl is lucky to have that 4.9% French blood which mostly comes from non-royal, less imbreed families, although some random French lady does show up twice (wife of a German).

Also, King Carl is related to the two previous Swedish Royal Families, one being of German origin, the other through Peter III of Russia mentioned earlier.