by Barry Hinckley
The world was greeted last week with the shocking news that Prince Harry and his bride, Meghan Markle, would be taking a step back from varsity level Royaling and endeavor to live like the rest of us, in the New World. I really do commend them for this decision, though as the experts have pointed out, it won’t be easy. That said, I have a suggestion on how to make the transition to “regular human” easier: Find out how many of us are related to you, by sharing your DNA on 23andMe. My bet is the results will be surprising today, and more surprising as more people share their DNA to find out “whom” they are REALLY related to…
I’ve heard three amazing stories, in the past month of people who found out “dad” wasn’t their “real dad” or finding long-lost half siblings, which they never knew where lost, if you know what I mean…true stories about what’s REALLY happened for centuries, in human reproduction…often times dalliances led to children which led to cover-ups. I suspect the same is true with the Royal family, if in fact not MORE true. We’ve all heard stories of royal princes and shall we say their “roaming interests”. A long standing and closely held tradition of “looking the other way”, while a member of the royal family, “had their way”. This behavior wasn’t isolated to the British Royal family, it happened in many royal families across Europe, whose family members were generally beyond reproach…until an unwanted pregnancy threatened to dilute the royal gene pool and embarrass the family in front of society and the church…
Interestingly we have one of those “myths’ in our family, which I suspect has as about much truth as Elizabeth Warren’s native ancestry, which I think is about .002%. That said, our family Royal Myth, which until my father blew the cover off it a few years ago, was only passed down through the eldest child on my paternal grandmother’s side. The story goes that the conductor of the Royal Orchestra, some time in the late 1800’s, had a daughter who became the object of “princely attention” and that attention turned into a pregnancy. At that point the professional grade cover up commenced and the daughter was dispatched to New Brunswick, Canada to start over with the secret in her belly. I have no idea if this family lore is true and as mentioned above, it’s very probably a family fable. That said, I am VERY confident, that if this story isn’t true, many others like it are…To that end I bet if Harry shared his DNA on 23andMe, in an effort to be more like us, he may find out that he actually is not only more like us, he IS ”one of us”!
He may even find he’s got hundreds of new family members here in “the New World” to welcome him to his new life and of course the ex-Royal couple will have places to go on Thanksgiving and Christmas, both here and in Canada.
I’m sure the Royal family has a protocol that precludes them from exposing their DNA to the scrutiny of the outside world, for exactly the reasons the cover-ups happened in the first place: royal dilution, financial dilution and of course embarrassment… However, now that Harry and Megan are joining the outside world, I’d encourage them to find out exactly how they fit in, by finding out who else left the Royal family for the new world, involuntarily, before they chose to do so, voluntarily…
Come on Harry, your banished cousins are waiting with open arms! In fact if my family story is true, I’ll save a seat for the three of you on Thanksgiving…
