Transplanting a Seattleite

"FWIW, it would appear that Mark Humphrys is on a lot of address books for reporters looking for quotes and is always prepared to emit some form of the statement "If you're western, you're descended from Charlemagne." And as near as I can tell, the origin of the meme itself is probably Jack Lee, a math professor at my alma mater, the University of Washington. The calculation assumes random mating, and otherwise treats as independent variables things which are not independent."

Hi there. Scepticism is good, but you should read the sources first. The idea that the West descends from Charlemagne does not depend on random mating. Nor does it depend on Jack Lee. It depends on many different lines of evidence. All is explained here:
http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.html

You may also be interested in the fact that we can prove descent from Charlemagne step-by-step for millions of people, including all of these famous people:
http://humphrysfamilytree.com/famous.descents.html