Got a king in your blood? If you can trace back to John of Gaunt, or
his father, King Edward III of England, you may ``share the same basic
royal heritage as the most noble knight.''

That's what Roderick W. Stuart says in the introduction to his second
edition of ``Royalty for Commoners,'' recently issued by Genealogical
Publishing Company. The book documents the complete known genealogy of
John of Gaunt.

According to the publisher of ``Plantagenet Ancestry'' by G. Andrews
Moriarty, ``King Edward III (John of Gaunt's father) is the latest
king from whom a large number of Americans can claim descent,'' the
book's introduction reports. ``His American posterity numbers in the
millions...His grandfather, King Edward I...has tens of millions of
additional American descendants.''

Mr. Stuart says that ``typically, the American descendant has several
colonial ancestors, one or more of whom can be traced to European
beginnings. With a little luck and a lot of hard work, the researcher
can link his family to that of John of Gaunt. Reading genealogical
literature is the key that unlocks the door to this accomplishment and
there are hundreds of books, fortunately some still in print, that
will be helpful in getting one started.''

Two such texts, ``Ancestral Roots of Sixty Colonists'' (1990), and
``The Magna Charta Sureties'' (1991), both by Frederick Lewis Weis,
have been reviewed here and are still in print.

``Royalty for Commoners'' documents more than 400 lines connected to
John of Gaunt and spread throughout Europe. Some go back to Roman
consuls of the fourth century A.D. The book reads like a Who's Who of
European royalty before 1340, when John of Gaunt was born.

The genealogy itself takes up 275 of the book's 412 pages, and
includes extensive citations. The bibliography alone requires more
than 40 pages, and the complete index takes up 70 more pages.

Mr. Stuart has over 30 years researching and compiling the
information. He himself warns, however, that ``medieval genealogy is
murky,'' and he cites a noted American scholar as saying,
``Connections to the ancient world are tentative, many pedigrees
before 1200 or so are often speculative, charters and other evidence
can be variously interpreted or misinterpreted, even the greatest
scholars often make mistakes, and compilers sifting among available
printed sources by necessity work at third hand.''

Given that caveat, anyone interested in European royalty connections
will find this book, carefully updated from the 1988 edition, an
extensive and invaluable source.

Copies of the hardcover edition should be arriving in better
libraries, genealogy bookstores and genealogical society sales
offices, or may be ordered directly at $30 plus $3 postage and
handling from Genealogical Publishing Company, Dept. SM, 1001 North
Calvert Street, Baltimore, Md., 21202-3897 (1-800-296-6687). --J.F.S.