Some dynastic house laws in existence today continue to exclude members who marry a spouse from outside the Gotha Part One or Part Two families. Dynasts loose all rights and refrain from the adoption of ancestral titles. In some German families this can still mean forfeiture of estates and property. However in a number of recent cases, marriages have been contracted which clearly fall well beyond the scope of what could be described as equal, but the head of the family at the time has been able to rely on obscure sub-clauses of family law which allows discretionary permission for such marriages to take place within the set family house law concerned.

Listings are now in genealogical order and the issue of morganatic marriages and the marriages themselves are now listed in the main body of the family entry from which they derive. There are sensible reasons for this. Previously when many more families were reigning new titles were created and a listing under a new line, in Part Three, placed the new generation according to rank. It was decided, however, after careful deliberation, that the Gotha should now retain family entries intact where they continue using the same name. However where an individual has renounced his rights or becomes a non-dynast as a result, we have marked this fact against the entry where it is the wish of the head of the family that we do so. In this way dynastic breaches are still clearly distinguished. Historically there has been a divergence of opinion on the question of morganatic marriages. Whilst some families believed the matter to be an issue of sacred proportions, others, such as Queen Victoria regarded it as ridiculous.

Only on one occasion in Britain did the question arise, uniquely the letters patent issued on the creation of the Dukedom of Windsor provided for the rank and style of Royal Highness for the Duke alone and not his wife or any subsequent issue. But that itself followed the earlier constitutional ruling by Prime Minister Baldwin, on the advice of lawyers, who were clear that the wife of a King was the Queen. Whereas It is understandable why, previously a sustained and concerted effort has been made by a caste to preserve and enhance its own status by means of a highly complex an obscure set of rules. This did of course occasionally lead to confusion.

The late Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone once recounted that at formal receptions at the Imperial Court at Berlin, Royal Highnesses were shepherded by the chamberlains into a room by themselves and were presented to the Kaiser and Kaiserin before the other royals. Princess Alice recalled that her cousin Princess Pauline of Wurttemberg (Royal Highness, Part I Princess) was so furious at being separated from her husband the Prince of Wied (Part II Prince but having only the rank of Durchlaucht, that is a Serene Highness, its meaning can best be literally described as "not the same") that she never returned to Court. Princess Alice by contrast, the daughter of one of Queen Victoria's sons, Part I Princess) but married to Prince Alexander of Teck (Queen Mary's brother but only a Part III Prince) found the situation hilarious.

At the end of World War Two when the Soviets occupied Gotha they immediately stormed the factory where the presses were housed and within five days, in a public display of protest, destroyed, by burning, most of the genealogical and heraldic archives. Since the books contained detailed references to the Romanov Dynasty, the attempt to obliterate history was made against these milestones. But the fate of the entire archive still remains a mystery, what was to the Soviets a classic symbol of a degenerate bourgeois society, was in any case a substantial archive of Genealogy on European Royalty and Nobility.