I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.
I’m a professional genealogist, and I have never found that to be true, the favoring of children of one sex over the other in vital records. “Legitimacy” was always important, and that required knowledge of both male and female lines of ancestry.
My mom has traced some parts of the tree back to the early 1700s. No one was famous that she knows of, but there are some interesting tales. One of my Irish ancestors ran away as a young man to become a sailor, and came to San Francisco by way of Cape Horn. My Czech great-grandfather was a construction worker on the Bay Bridge.
‘Round here, it’s hard to get back any farther than the Thirty Years War. Most records kept back then were birth/baptism registers which often did not survive the Swedes’ visit to the village.
I agree, it is unfortunate, I should like to see just how far back the line goes…My sister is planning to do her own research, and take up where our Aunt left off. Of the cousins who go back to Robert the Bruce I am directly related to the Hamilton line. I’ll have to drop by my sister and her husbands home to see the linage chart with all the embroidered family crests…I’ll write more when I have the chance to do that.
** [ Moderator Mode ] **
stockton, as you noted, this is not the Pit. You should have quit while you were ahead.
violet9, if your remark was intended to be facetious, you seriously failed to indicate that you intended humor. If you were not being facetious, you are out of line in GQ.
** [ /Moderator Mode ] **
I started researching my own family just last month, and in that time have managed to correct a couple of my grandfather’s records (not that I’d ever tell him). So far I’ve managed to make the leap from Canada to Dorset in 1868(Dorset? With a grand Scots name like mine?). From there, I’ve managed to get back to 1805, and I’m waiting for info on that guy.
The coolest part was finding a guy online with whom I share a common set of GGG-Grandparents (G-Grandparents for him). He’s managed to tell me craploads of stuff about my family in Manitoba that I’d never heard before and sent me pictures of people I’d always read about but never seen.
No idea how much anyone cares, but for the record, I meant that I managed to figure out from that my ancestors came from Dorset to Canada in 1868.
1736, thanks to British colonial records. First bearer of my surname to set foot on Gibraltar was a prisoner freed from a Barbary pirate ship and allowed to remain there by the British authorities. The family has the document, dated 1736. It doesn’t say how old he was, but it’s assumed he was already an adult, so he would have been born in the early years of the 18th century.
Circa 1700, the king of Aragon, Navarra and Castilla (collectively known as Spain, but still 3 separate kingdoms at the time) died without issue. Castilla did not have an heir apparent; the one for Aragon was the second son of the English king; the one for Navarra was a grandson of Louis XIV. After some KBooms, the French side won.
King Felipe V declared Aragon “conquered land” and joined them to Castilla, liking Castillian laws best. He wanted to do the same with Navarra, but he couldn’t, since his claim to the throne was actually from Navarra: he couldn’t declare his biggest backers as “conquered”, at least not without getting Gramps’ knickers in a tizzy. When your gramps is Louis XIV and your country is next door to France, you really don’t want to make him angry.
So what Felipe did was claim that he didn’t believe the records for the Navarrese Parliament Rosters were “clean”: anybody who claimed that he had a right to a seat in Parliament (either a permanent inherited one, or the right to be elected to one) must provide “blood proof”, a document detailing his right to be in Parliament on all eight great-grandparents’ sides. No jewish blood (although that was not a requirement of the Navarrese Parliament, but Felipe never bothered read our laws), no criminals, no slaves or serfs (there were never serfs in Navarra like there had been in other places, but again… he didn’t care). If you claimed that your seat was permanent and inherited, you had to go all the way up to whomever got a seat… on all eight sides!
My family’s “proof” goes back to the IX century. On all sides. That’s about when the kingdom was born, not bad. I haven’t read the whole proof, but I have seen the documents listing the rosters for the first three calls to “a meeting of Parliament”, with my greatgrandwhatevers being listed as being “captains of the town of XYZ and keepers of its stronghold”; you can actually see how the lastname changes to include the town’s name. Ever since the proofs, the family’s patriarch has kept an updated family tree as well as held our copy of the proof. Pretty much everybody in my high school class had a family tree going up to the early 1700 (and a blood proof to go with it, generally kept by some cousin).
If you’ve got Basque blood, you should be able to go IX century with a bit of digging.
An American friend who’s 7/8 Scottish once told me it’s pretty much the same for them, in their case going back to the Fourth Clan Wars, which were one or two centuries earlier (if i remember correctly). And of course lots of practicing Jews can trace all the way to Adam and Eve.
Hmmm… isn’t there a certain class of Jews who are supposedly direct descendents of Aaron the brother of Moses? Levites?
The earliest person who I can trace lineage from was born circa 1580 in Touques, Normandie.
Why do you think the English choose a German to become king? Because he was a descendant of William the Conqueror, that’s why.
As to your statement concerning my previous post, either cite the source of your proof; pit me or shush. :wally:
kniz. Ixnay on the allyway. This is GQ. Keep it civil.
Can Handle the Truth. Live up to your name. If you disagree with someone’s assertion in GQ, then offer proof or take it to the Pit, if that’s where you need it to be. Don’t make sly cracks about not having the time. Put up or shut up. Or take it to the proper forum, depending on what you’re trying to prove. You can teach people history here in GQ. I rather think that’s part of what we’re about.
samclem GQ moderator
My great uncle Owen traced the family back to a William Sutton, who arrived in New York from England in 1749. “William” is a family name that pops up every generation (or two, at most). He wound up in Virginia, and his grand children moved to Tennessee. Their grandchildren moved to Missouri, and we kind of spread all over from there.
My great-great Uncle William (my great uncle Owen’s uncle) knifed a man in a bar fight in Missouri, and thought that he’d killed him. The victim was a popular man, and g-g uncle Bill moved to El Paso and changed his name. He married a Mexican gal and had lots of children. He confessed on his deathbed that his name was really William Sutton, and that he (or so he thought) was wanted for murder in Missouri.
I met a Taylor from Missouri when I was stationed in Germany, and recalled from Uncle Owen’s geneology that when our family moved to Missouri from Tennessee after the Civil War, they travelled most of the way with a family of Taylors, and intermarried with them. This guy recalled that his family moved to Missouri from Tennessee after the Civil War, did some checking, and it turned out he was a decendant of those Taylors, and had kinfolk in southern Missouri named Sutton.
More MPSIMS than anything else.
I don’t know why I find genealogy fascinating - but I do.
JOHN MACE - I read with avid interest the story of Cheddar man. It was a DNA experiment using local school children as donors. They needed a specific number of samples, so the class teacher stepped up. It turns out that HE was a direct decendent of the 9,000 year old Cheddar Man - WoW!
I am firmly convinced that every human living is a relative. The latest evidence strongly suggest that we are ALL descended from a relatively small group of people living at the end of the last ice age - abt. 10,000 years ago. I’m too sleepy to go fetch cites now, but it’s been well-publisized.
Cecil has written about “ancestor collapse” - the phenomenom whereby any two randomly selected people will have at least one common ancestor within a relatively small number of generations. (phenom. begins at around 5 generations and increases frequency with each successive generation.) I don’t have the cite for that either, off hand.
I’ve been working sporadically on my family genealogy for some years. I often wonder why. These folks are utterly alien to me - we wouldn’t have a thing to say to each other if we met at a party (or religious gathering - more likely). But somehow it fascinates. I’m lucky in researching because both my mother & father’s side settled in one place and stayed there for 250 years - that definitely helps. There’ve been several genealogy’s of both sides of my family that have been published - but I don’t trust any of them… Written 70 to 100 years ago by people whose scholarship, in my opinion, is in doubt. However, through my own efforts, I have comfirmed one ancester that came from Stratford-on-Avon in 1634 - and one who was definitely on the Virginia/Kentucky frontier in around 1790. For some reason, I would really like to know the origin of as many of my ancestral lines as possible - go figure!
There is a company who is doing genealogical dna analysis - for a fee, of course, that I found recently - http://www.familytreedna.com . Interesting.
Ex-Tank: The Suttons go way back, with documented lines. I have a tie-in to them back in the 1400s (so we’re N-to-the-high-exponent-th cousins). Try coming at the connection “from the other direction” – following the older researched-lineage Suttons forward to see if you can chase down Wm. Sutton (fl. 1749) as a descendant of one of them. That worked for me with my major get-back-past-1700 connection, the Harringtons – somebody had done a thorough job on them, and there was my great-great-grandmother, infant daughter of a proud Harrington father with the right name, date, and time, but about whom the Harrington researcher knew nothing more (I had the rest of it already).
[QUOTE=samclemCan Handle the Truth. Live up to your name. If you disagree with someone’s assertion in GQ, then offer proof or take it to the Pit, if that’s where you need it to be. Don’t make sly cracks about not having the time. Put up or shut up. Or take it to the proper forum, depending on what you’re trying to prove. You can teach people history here in GQ. I rather think that’s part of what we’re about. [/QUOTE]
I’m sorry for my sarcastic outburst, which was inappropriate in GQ. I will be able to support my assertions with facts, but it will take several days to search out the details, since I was relying on memory. I hope this thread is still active by then.
Can Handle the Truth:
Yeah, the male ancestry of Lilibet goes back to, not Hanover, but Saxe-Coburg (Victoria was the last Hanoverian).
But the descent through the female line links back to William the Bastard quite properly, and that’s the way in which the throne was inherited.
Like this, with right-carets showing ancestry:
Elizabeth II > George VI > George V > Edward VII > Victoria
Victoria > Duke of Kent > George III > Frederick Prince of Wales > George II > George I
George I > Sophia Electress of Hanover > another Sophia, married to a German prince > James I of England and VI of Scotland
James I > Mary Queen of Scots > James V of Scotland > Margaret Queen of Scots
Margaret > Henry VII > Margaret Beaufort > Earl of Somerset > John of Gaunt
John of Gaunt > Edward III > Edward II > Edward I > Henry III > John
John > Henry II > Matilda, Countess of Anjou and Dowager Empress > Henry I
Henry I > William I the Conqueror
For those who missed Cunctator’s post back in page 1, he had a link to this column of Cecil’s:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_083b.html
Here’s some relevant quotes from that (bolding is mine):
“If you go back far enough, however, pedigree collapse happens to everybody. Think of your personal family tree as a diamond-shaped array imposed on the ever-spreading fan of human generations. (I told you this was cosmic.) As you trace your pedigree back, the number of ancestors in each generation increases steadily up to a point, then slows, stops, and finally collapses. Go back far enough and no doubt you would find that you and all your ancestors were descended from the first human tribe in some remote Mesopotamian village. Or, if you like, from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.”
“Pedigree collapse explains why it’s so easy for professional genealogists to trace your lineage back to royalty–go far enough back and you’re related to everybody. For that matter, you’re probably related to everybody alive today. Some geneticists believe that everybody on earth is at least 50th cousin to everybody else. For a fuller discussion of the above, see The Mountain of Names, by Alex Shoumatoff (1985).”