Quote Originally Posted by Innocentius
I'm sorry to be the first pessimist in here, but: I believe either you or your aunt (or the both of you) are lying. A lot of people want their family trees to be famous and great, and it's not unusual for people to make things up. For example, according to Swedish genealogy about 50% of the Swedish population are related to Birger Magnusson ("Birger Jarl", an important character in Swedish medieval history) and about 10% would be related to Gustav Vasa.
I don't see any reason to doubt him. First of all, he's not exactly claiming that he's related to anyone famous. All of the relatives he list were essentially men-at-arms in various armies. That's prominent enough to be interesting to us historians, but far from being 'famous' in any real sense. It makes sense as well, since that's about the minimum level of wealth/station that you would need in order to get your existence recorded in local church records and to have marked graves which could be traced.

Besides, someone has to be related to all these ancient people. Given a large enough population, a small percentage will be able to trace their lineage back a long, long way. This guy could be one of the lucky ones. Far stranger ancestral connections have popped up over the years, such as the Cheddar history teacher whose family has apparently lived in the same place for 9,000 years. (link) There's also the fact that 8% of all Mongolian men really are related to Genghis Khan. (link)

Personally, my history does not go back very far. My father's side emigrated from Poland and Austria in the early 20th century, while my mother's emigrated mainly from Ireland and German in the early 19th century. We've traced my mother's side back to living relatives in Ireland and Germany, but my father's side disappeared during the Holocaust. For the record though, the relatives we know of were largely peasants, with the exception of one son of a minor Irish noble who got himself disowned when he married a peasant girl.