Why are so many people descended from royalty?

 Just checking connections at WikiTree this morning, I found quite a few members of royalty in the list of people I'm supposed descended from.  Well, first of all, I haven't found those connections, so I'm not entirely convinced.  If I follow a single line back to that supposed ancestor, I find a lot of breaks in the line; lots of assumptions and guesses that so-and-so was the father of so-and-so.  It's interesting to see the possibility but I haven't accepted it completely.

But, as I looked up a couple of people I'm supposedly descended from, I wondered:  Why are so many people descended from royalty?  After all, there were only a handful of royals, initially.  They didn't all run around the countryside impregnating women; although, apparently, some of them did.

One reason, of course, is that people see and believe what they want to see and believe and have embellished their family tree with royal ancestors.  If they could they would claim descent from fairy princesses.

But, one reason is that royalty had to substantiate their royalty through descendancy and through genealogical trees.  They kept records of their families.  Here, I have to say that those family trees wee often embellished and falsified as well.  Watch the historical movies where there were conflicts over who was the legitimate heir to a throne.

The point is that they kept records.  In the meantime, commoners had enough to do just to stay alive; with hunger and wars.  None of them could read or write.  Babies were born at home.  Masses of people, through centuries, lived and died and only their immediate families knew or cared.

So, the reason so many people seemed to be descended from royalty is because many of us; probably most of us; can't find our ancestors because there were no records of them.  Sad but true.