Whilst idly looking myself up on the internet (as you do!), I stumbled upon an entry on a website about myself, from this website I was able to trace my ancestry back to an Anglo-Saxon noble who died in 1068 [in fact searching his name I notice that it has been claimed that this particular person was the son of the Sveyn II King of Denmark, but this seems completely unsubstantiated].
Now the internet site I found uses 3 sources: Burke’s Peerage, Burke’s Landed Gentry and The Complete Peerage. I’m already aware of the family links described in Burke’s Peerage and these are pretty much unimpeachable. The cites from The Complete Peerage seems to just support what is widely accepted by historians. The cites from Burke’s Landed Gentry I cannot verify independently.
How likely is it that this site is correct and I can trace my ancestry back almost 1000 years?
The further back you go, the higher the chance that there’s been a cuckoo in the nest. After enough generations, it’s a certainty. Even if you could trace your name back to, say, 1015, there’s not much chance you’re actually descended from those people. On the male line, at least.
None of them should be regarded as infallible. It also depends what exactly you want to check.
For the descents of peerages, such works are usually accurate. That’s because peers tended to be prominent individuals and because the titles themselves are evidence of relationships. Also, the difficult cases tended to be the ones that these authors and other genealogists loved trying to untangle.
But other information can be decidedly dodgy. In fairness, they were all originally compiled when genealogical research was much more difficult than it is today. However, the Burke’s volumes - like their rivals - could often to be uncritical, especially about family origins, and they usually just kept repeating the old information in the subsequent editions. Worse, they rarely cited any sources. The Complete Peerage is better, mainly because it was always intended to be a more scholarly. The influence of J.H. Round was especially beneficial. But inevitably it’s now showing its age, even after the 1998 volume of addenda and corrigenda. Other corrections can be found here.
And, of course, as others have said, there’s the problem of false paternities…
I had my ancestry traced professionally by an old and reputable company of genealogists based in Canterbury, Kent. My eldest son stumped up the cost and traced not only his paternal line but maternal too (my ex-wife). We found that not only were my ex-wife and I related but both of us were descended from Edward I (Longshanks).
However, as the genealogist gently reminded us, the vast majority of those with any English blood in their veins, both here in England and around the world, would also be descended from royalty and related to us, however distantly. It’s next to impossible it should be otherwise given the exponential proliferation of relatives as one goes back. As to the royal connection the guy explained that most commonly it was a man that made good, got himself a knighthood and married upwards to some daughter of landed gentry. Follow that line back and you’re guaranteed to strike royal gold. Both my ex-wife and myself are descended from Joan of Acre, daughter to Edward I. Of course when you tap into that you can trace your line back to Kings of Jerusalem, Frankish monarchs and Roman senators in the twilight of Empire. All great fun if pretty meaningless.
You can be sure with reputable genealogists of accuracy, at the least back to the Conquest. The net and personal research, well, not so much obviously.
In the United States one plus (albeit sad one) of the slave trade is that because of slave records (being bought and sold) many black Americans can trace their ancestry back to the slave ship they were brought over on. Which could go all the way back to the 1700’s.
It is a kind of mixed shame that years ago many of the old slaveholding families burned their old record books or else the books were not preserved so those records are lost.
Of course, I traced my ancestry based on the existing parish records in England. However, my ancestors were “bloody peasants!” so the record peters out somewhere around 1700, with a few cryptic entries before that. Apparently thanks to Crowell and his ilk, there was no church hierarchy determined to register anyone and everyone or even caring about registration from about 1640 to 1665 and things are pretty spotty before and after.
I’m not aware of any meaningful, reliable, and relatively complete records outside of those parish registers. And of course, things get confusing in the mid-1800’s when people started moving all over Britain and some birth records, as far as I can tell, did not bother listing parents.
I can point to ancestors born around 1700, listing parents who are not registered. I can point to births in the same village, same surname, from 1612 or so - grandparent? Sibling of grandparent? But the record gets hazy.
the other polite term I’ve heard is “pedigree error”. Depending on whose research you believe, the incidence is somewhere between 2% and 10%.
There’s the apocryphal story of the teacher in England who asked his students to compare blood-types as a biology heredity only to find that X% had blood types incompatible with their listed parents. Of course, how many people in the 1960’s knew their blood type, and even so, what are the odds that a random incorrect “father” would produce a blood type discrepancy? Plus, I’ve never been able to find an original source for that story.
(Plus, as others have pointed out in discussing this topic, it includes the possibility of adoptions, guardianships, and children from pre-marriage relationships.)
I mean, false paternity may be much less of a problem for kings than for normal people. Historically, cuckolding a king was considered treason, so it was probably less common.
But yea, for an average person, the rate of false paterntity is something like 2% or so (some early studies found 10%, so it may be higher, but those ones were probably less reliable). If we assume 2%, then your pure male-line genealogy has a 10% chance of being wrong after 5 generations, a 19% of going wrong after 10 generations, a 25% chance after 15 generations, a 33% chance after 20, and a slightly over 50% of being wrong if you extend it to 35 generations.
Assuming 30 years per generation, 35 generations is going to put you sometime in the mid-10th century AD.
If the false paternity rate is 10%, then genealogies will typically have a 50% chance of going wrong if you extend them past 1815 or so, and if it’s 6%, then the cutoff date is going to be around 1685.
As I have pointed out before “false paternity” does not necessarily mean cuckolding, it can mean simply informal adoption of a nephew/niece or stepchild.
For instance Alan Shepard, the US astronaut raised one of his wife’e nieces as his own daughter, she even had his surname.
there’s the hilarious scene in The Prince Regent where King George IV’s randy German bride is arriving in London. She obviously expects to carry on like she did in Germany, and makes some flirtaciuos comment to her escort. Her face drops like a lead weight when he replies “Oh, no madam; no one would do that. You are the future Queen of England, a man could lose his head for simply looking at you wrongly.”
I recall reading that, unless there is absolutely no crossbreeding between populations at all, if you go back a couple of hundred generations, you can neatly divide all people then alive into two groups:
[ol]
[li]Individuals who are ancestors to no people currently living.[/li][li]Individuals who are ancestors to all people currently living.[/li][/ol]
With only the smallest sliver of people belonging in the “ancestor to some, but not all” category.
Naturally, thus rule doesn’t apply if there are hard barriers to breeding between groups. But a general tendency of royals to not intermix with non-royals does not constitute a hard enough barrier. The kind of barrier that is hard enough looks more like “an ocean’s in the way”.
Absolutely wrong. Most African American lineages go “dark” right around 1865. Census records rarely listed slaves by name, only by gender and age. I have never heard of anyone being able to trace their ancestry back to the 1700s the way you describe.
As noted, it is estimated to be 5,000 - 15,000 years ago. If a generation is 20 years, then “a couple hundred generations” is about right. Before the “age of discovery”, this point was probably further back in time.
My uncle’s a geneology fan, and managed to trace our ancestry all the way back to the Plantagenet kings of England. However, like others have said, the lineage may not be 100% accurate – for example, my grandfather and my great-grandmother both had facial features which were strikingly similar to that of Native Americans. So yeah, YMMV.
A girl I know has high cheekbones, a round face, dark hair and kind of almond shaped eyes, so she gets “Are you half Asian” or “Are you Native American” so often it drives her crazy. I would have guessed Russian or something if I met her the first time, but she swears she’s purely English and Irish.
