There were several US presidents who had modest beginnings. I think this is more a consequence of exponential growth. 2**30 is ~1 billion ancestors, so by the pigeonhole principle and some fairly weak assumptions on mixing, you can count nearly every member of your ethnic group from that time as a distant ancestor. I think this girl landed on Plantagenet mostly because he would have a well-documented lineage compared to your average serf.
~2^30 describes the situation today, not in the 1700’s. ~2^20 would only be a million or so people at the time this country was founded.
Give it another 250 years and we’ll probably have a largely Asian president that’s also a descendant. IE: It’s an expanding circle of political elites combined with an expanding circle of descendants.
