That sounds like a winner. Never heard of that, very interesting. I wonder how they fared during the Cultural Revolution?
I also would have assumed someone from China, like Confucius.
I read somewhere that Courtney Cox of Friends fame claims ancestry to William the Conqueror, which goes back a good 1000 years. No idea whether that’s true or not.
The Sacrificial Official to Confucius is a political office of the Republic of China (Nationalists) and moved to Taiwan with the rest of the Nationalist government when the mainland fell to the Communists.
While she is indeed descended from William the Conqueror (which isn’t especially interesting), she can in a sense go one better. The episode she did of Who Do You Think You Are? argued that she was descended from the Berkeleys of Berkeley Castle. They traditionally claim to be one of only a handful of families descended in the male line from someone in Anglo-Saxon England who was not royal.
I forgot where I read it but I think it turns out that a fairly high percentage of people who can claim Anglo ancestry have William’s DNA. Too lazy to Google (sorry).
Yeah I think its the nature of human family trees that any sufficiently fecund historical figure will leave a significant percentage of the modern day population as his descendants. Attila the Hun and Charlemagne are similar in that regard IIRC.
Of course even if surnames were thing back then they wouldn’t have passed them on as the vast majority of their offspring were the “wrong side of the blanket”
Random fact concerning this as William the Conqueror was brought up. Prior to conversion to the Christianity and for a while afterwards the Normans did consider illegitimate children to be valid heirs. William the Conqueror, was one of the last Norman rulers to ascend to power this way, prior to being William the Conqeuror he was known as William the Bastard. Though calling him that to his face could be unwise, as discovered by someone who did so during a siege (something along on the lines of “Bastard son of a tanner” as his mother was a allegedly a tanner who caught the Dukes eye while tanning hides) and was flayed alive by William after successful taking his castle.
Almost everyone who claims to be descended from the Anglo-Saxons does so via Empress Matilda, who was also William the Conqueror’s granddaughter. And it works the other way round as well, as almost everyone who claims to be descended from William the Conqueror does so via Matilda.
King Felipe of Spain is descended from Matilda.
Genghis Kahn
Since a 2003 study found evidence that Genghis Khan’s DNA is present in about 16 million men alive today , the Mongolian ruler’s genetic prowess has stood as an unparalleled accomplishment.
As I mention above figures like that which huge proportion of the planet can claim descent from don’t really count, as A) Surnames were not a thing (in Europe at least) when they were around so while some of their kids might have inherited their title, they didn’t inherit a name. B) The majority of their children were illegitimate (or the result of rape) so would not have passed on their surname even if that had been a thing.
I guess the question I would have is - can someone really count and list each ancestor in the ladder to that famous figure? I can see that for someone who can connect their family tree to someone of noble blood, I imagine the generational pedigree is fairly complete for most of the higher nobility of Europe. The trick for anyone else would be to make that connection to a more recent noble. Even if descended from a nephew, say, the connection can be made. It depends whether you are chasing origin of the Y chromosome or not.
I tried following my family tree (mostly male line) and was fortunate that the parish registers for their English villages were preserved and digitized. However, the reliability is doubtful back in the age of random spelling. Also, gaps appear; and records during and before the English Civil War are spotty at best. There is almost nothing before 1600. (There’s for example a “Joan” with the correct last name, born about 1600 which based on age would make her sister of likely the ancestor not found; but Joan’s christening lists her father’s name, so maybe that’s the oldest ancestor I can identify, born about 1580 or so assuming he was at least 20 when his daughter was born.) I think it was Henry VIII who mandated a register of births (actually, baptisms), deaths, and marriages so beyond that, most of us peasants are out of luck.
Charlemagne and Charles Martel (who incidentally was another technically illegitimate heir) were two different people and although the former was the grandson of the latter there is no evidence that I know of for the assumption of ‘Martel’ as a surname for the dynasty, which anyway was applied to that first Charles retroactively long, long after his death.
Martel was a common enough French nickname, hence folks like the Angevin Geoffrey Martel who was around centuries after Charles Martel, was no relative and unlike him more probably bore that nickname in life (he was so named in a chronicle just a few years after his death). Another set of Martels who did use it as a surname were minor gentry in Normandy and arrived in England with William the Conqueror. There is most likely no direct connection with that family at the time and the Carolingians.
Specifically, “Martel,” meaning “Hammer,” was a sobriquet attached to him because of his success in battle. It’s like saying that “Lionhearted” was Richard I’s surname. Or “Magne” was Charlemagne’s surname.
Here’s a complete pedigree: Confucius again
I have an entry on peerage.com (a site recording the family trees of English peers, etc and various royal families) as my grandmother’s family were what could be considered minor nobilty. When I am bored I see how far back I can go starting from my entry on the site, going through purported ancestors.
The furthest back-in-time entry from mine I can find is someone who supposedly died in 275 AD. The historicity and dates at this point and for several suceeding generations are highly suspect, but suprisingly it’s only really in the 7th century AD where this particular chain goes from attested at, or near, the time relationships to the realms of fantasy. Obviously it takes one inaccuracy to break a chain, so it should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Coincidently, I can also find chains from myself which go back to William I without going through Maltilda or to the anglo-saxons without going through William I (both through the Berkleys and not through the Berkleys)
Of course, as it’s through my granmother, only one other person in the chain(s) has the same surname.
With the discussion of illegitimate heirs - how likely was European society to track this sort of ancestry? I can see if the father was someone really prominent like the king or one of the barons, but if the father was Sir Reginald who lorded over 2 or 3 villages back in medieval times, how likely that anyone would record that he was the father? Is shame over illegitimacy a fairly recent social construct? Did the social standing of the mother affect this? (i.e. who cares about the upstairs maid’s child’s pedigree?)
The addition of “Fitz” to a surname meant that you were an acknowledged son of the individual whose name you bore, but were a bastard. So, Fitzwilliam, Fitzgerald, etc: bastards, but official bastards.
Fitzroy is the biggest one: Roy as in royalty: a Fitzroy was a king’s bastard.
Since these names were (and are) reasonably common, I’m guessing aristocratic bastards felt more pride than shame in their status.
Fitz just means son of and was a common appellation. It was used for bastards as below. But a legitimate heir might also be called ‘son of’.
While Fitzroy did survive as a surname it was also pretty common in England at least for succeeding generations to take the name of the more prestigious maternal line in the case of a lucky bastard marrying into nobility. So one King John’s illegitimate sons, Richard Fitzroy, married Rose de Dover heiress to the barony of Chilham. Their son was…Richard de Dover.
Richard Fitzroy was himself the son of Adela de Warenne. The Warenne earls of Surrey had gone extinct in the male line back in the 12th century, but the enormously wealthy heiress of that family Isabel had married (among others) Hamelin de Anjou, the bastard son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou and father of King Henry II. Hamelin seems to have immediately adopted the Warenne surname himself, as did his descendants.
I’ve always been fascinated by the Percy family, the current dukes of Northumberland; they can trace their linage all the way back to William de Percy in 1067, and have kept the name throughout, but not always in the male line.