# Roman Ancestry? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 3, 2002, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-ancestry/130732 "2002-10-03T20:35:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [July 9, 2013, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-ancestry/130732/41 "2013-07-09T13:58:58Z")
> [@bob\_2](#): > > When I started to research my tree, I discovered that there are two distinct kinds of genealogist: One group happily latches on to the smallest link, coincidence or similarity, and the other will not accept anything that is not supported by original documents. > > It is no coincidence that the first group can trace their ancestry a lot further back than the latter. Whether their tree is accurate, or just a collection of random names, is open to conjecture. My family go by church records [births, deaths, marriages, christenings] and ships records. It is a squeeze, but we just barely got back to mid 1200s in France because the French bunch smartened up and bailed out to the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Britain just before the guillotine came down. [in a manner of speaking, we had some advantageous marriages and a few diplomatic postings, and a couple outright evacuations before the mobs could get there.] ---
**Author:** ![Bozuit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/edb3f5/32.png) [@Bozuit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bozuit)\ **Post date:** [July 9, 2013, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-ancestry/130732/42 "2013-07-09T22:15:16Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > It is a squeeze, but we just barely got back to mid 1200s in France because the French bunch smartened up and bailed out to the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Britain just before the guillotine came down. In the 13th century? Or am I missing something? ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2013, 10:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-ancestry/130732/43 "2013-07-10T10:36:04Z")
> [@Bozuit](#): > > In the 13th century? > > Or am I missing something? The guillotine came down for the French Revolution, though thanks to marriages out of France, some data existed for carrying the French lineage portion of my mongrel family back past the French Revolution to other european countries, which pushed the ability to find records back to the 1200s as family bibles and other records existed in cadet line possession. IOW, the French records got burned, but copies and references existed because of marriages out of France happening, so we could do an end run around the revolutionary damage and pick up the broken threads and continue back. While it would be a hoot to be able to go back to Roman Gaul, it isn’t going to happen, unless there is something at the Vatican archives. My 1200s ancestoress did not spring from some dieties forehead fully formed, but we can legitimately not find a reference to her parentage, just her marriage record to a count in a church record. He also was ended as a source, he was given a county and moved in to it and got married, we have no record of where he came from. We are assuming he did something really spiffy in combat so the king gave him a title and land. \ ---
**Author:** ![Bozuit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/edb3f5/32.png) [@Bozuit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bozuit)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2013, 11:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-ancestry/130732/44 "2013-07-10T11:10:21Z")
Ah, I see. I read your post as saying you couldn’t trace further back than the 1200s because of the French Revolution, rather than that you were able to reach that far back because your ancestors avoided it. Is this a common issue with French records? ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2013, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-ancestry/130732/45 "2013-07-10T23:24:40Z")
> [@Bozuit](#): > > Ah, I see. I read your post as saying you couldn’t trace further back than the 1200s because of the French Revolution, rather than that you were able to reach that far back because your ancestors avoided it. > > Is this a common issue with French records? Fairly frequently - a similar issue is possible in Britain also - political upheavals resulting in revolutionaries burning records, and Henry 8th burning Catholic church records [and churches too.] When the Soviets took over in Russia, a fair number of records got fried there as well. I admit I am fairly lazy, what I really need to do is get the German and British Isles sets of family finished - I need to actually spend about 2 years actually over there going through the records myself, I dislike scans and photocopies. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roman-ancestry/130732.md?page=2)