My family tree, and history…

[Craiglxviii]

Over the last week or so I have been researching my family tree. Myhistory.com

I decided to see how far back I could take it. Got to well into the Muddle Ages… and kept on going. Well. Imagine my surprise when I reached the end of the line…

IMG_2409.png

To be clear, this is the brother-in-law to Constantine the Great. To say that this was unexpected (it comes from the Welsh side of the family) is an understatement!

[pandion]

4394MarcusAurelius.jpg

Over the last week or so I have been researching my family tree. Myhistory.com

I decided to see how far back I could take it. Got to well into the Muddle Ages… and kept on going. Well. Imagine my surprise when I reached the end of the line…

...

To be clear, this is the brother-in-law to Constantine the Great. To say that this was unexpected (it comes from the Welsh side of the family) is an understatement!

Congratulations! It gives a strange feeling to get some comprehension on how far back you go. I only got 13 generations back, to a person born ca 1590 (Sigfried). But considering that the genes from him get split in half by each new generation my total gene make-up only contains 0,0122 % of material coming from him (if I got my math right). It gets more exiting when you know or can find something about an ancestor, even if it may be only a curiosity. Or when you have oral tradition - which my mother collected going back to a person born in 1785.

I'm sure you can share some curious things re your ancestors going back so far with us. I remember a British colleguae who told me that he ceased doing ancestry research when he found an ancestor who had been hung for piracy ...

I enclose a photo of a statue of your ancestor that I took in Rome in 2009.

[Craiglxviii]

Over the last week or so I have been researching my family tree. Myhistory.com

I decided to see how far back I could take it. Got to well into the Muddle Ages… and kept on going. Well. Imagine my surprise when I reached the end of the line…

...

To be clear, this is the brother-in-law to Constantine the Great. To say that this was unexpected (it comes from the Welsh side of the family) is an understatement!

Congratulations! It gives a strange feeling to get some comprehension on how far back you go. I only got 13 generations back, to a person born ca 1590 (Sigfried). But considering that the genes from him get split in half by each new generation my total gene make-up only contains 0,0122 % of material coming from him (if I got my math right). It gets more exiting when you know or can find something about an ancestor, even if it may be only a curiosity. Or when you have oral tradition - which my mother collected going back to a person born in 1785.

I'm sure you can share some curious things re your ancestors going back so far with us. I remember a British colleguae who told me that he ceased doing ancestry research when he found an ancestor who had been hung for piracy ...

It’s funny you mention piracy. Another direct-line ancestor of mine, I only discovered today, was Henry Morgan. First Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, sugar plantation owner and slaver, and harasser-pirate-privateer towards the Spaniards. Also has a well known spiced rum named after him.

[David Newton]

It's also an utterly fictitious relationship.

There is no documented link between Roman Europe and Middle Ages Europe in genealogy. Lots of people have tried and lots of people have failed and lots of people promote fraudulent genealogies. Not suggesting you're doing that by any means, but lots of people do that.

There's even worse than that however. There are Mormons who believe they literally can go back to Adam. They are credulous and stupid enough to believe that they can document connections back to Biblical times and then go back to would you Adam and Eve it? The very start.

So disregard anything in that purported line before the very earliest European royal lines. Also be very careful about the line back to what's called your gateway ancestor. That's someone who's known to be related to royalty and is properly documented. There are lots of people who engage in a lot of wishful thinking and extremely shoddy research trying to get a link to a gateway ancestor.

[Belushi TD]

My German relatives sent me a PDF back about 2010. It has the family traced back through the local records in Bocholt, Germany to about 1730 or so. The current end of it is VERY wide, as it traces just about everyone from the common ancestor in 1730.

As one might expect from a lineage that goes back almost 300 years in a small town, after a while there's some consanguity. No sister/brother kind of thing, but if I understand the relationships correctly a couple second cousins and more than a couple third cousins.

Belushi TD

[Craiglxviii]

It's also an utterly fictitious relationship.

There is no documented link between Roman Europe and Middle Ages Europe in genealogy. Lots of people have tried and lots of people have failed and lots of people promote fraudulent genealogies. Not suggesting you're doing that by any means, but lots of people do that.

There's even worse than that however. There are Mormons who believe they literally can go back to Adam. They are credulous and stupid enough to believe that they can document connections back to Biblical times and then go back to would you Adam and Eve it? The very start.

So disregard anything in that purported line before the very earliest European royal lines. Also be very careful about the line back to what's called your gateway ancestor. That's someone who's known to be related to royalty and is properly documented. There are lots of people who engage in a lot of wishful thinking and extremely shoddy research trying to get a link to a gateway ancestor.

What I have is, father to son to grandson etc. from this chap, through to <another> with a Latin name, whose son’s name is only recorded in Welsh- and he was the first acknowledged King of Brecknockshire (modern day Brecon area):

IMG_2417.png

Then his line is well recorded, as after the Norman invasion they stayed as knights and Sheriffs of Cardigan & Pembroke, until they fell in with my great-grandmother’s lot.

[Zen9]

My family is somewhat stumped by mystery males only a few generations back.
Such we know the family name is adopted ftom a coastal family and we can only follow from the female at that point.

This I can, thanks to Dorset Online Registry, trace from here back to the 1400s, but cannot yet get hold of the resource that some student had who put a paper online that includes people of that name in the right part of Purbeck in 1280....
Time and money to solve that puzzle.

And on the other side as a ward of chancery we might be able to trace the law firm involved but it's part of the nature of such endowment to keep who might have paid for it secret.
Such firms in Bristol were often used by aristocracy at that time. To cover up various illegitimate children, favour a servant, or bribe silence....
He had a family bible but tore out the first page and burnt it one drunken night. My grandmother threw the book away in the 60's.

But firms merge or go bust and old records get thrown away as of no use to a modern business. Likely disposed of in the 60's.

And his Army records were bombed by the Luftwaffe.

But through the female sides we can carry on back.
Related to the Coles who used to own half of Poole High Street shops and services.
Back to a certain family called Cook......yes those Cooks in a property in Kent bought by a certain Captain....
Back to a woman from Ireland.
Back through to a refugee from French oppression of Protestants.
Over to the Frys, as in Elizabeth Fry who campaigned for prison reform.

Back to various strands up into the Midlands and including a surname of Davis... likely Welsh in origin.
The Purbeck line starts with a marriage to a woman who is either French or Portuguese. Oh and later includes a Banks woman (they owned Corfe Castle and much connected to the Royals)....likely a bastard of the family taken in for love or a dowry. Ironic considering on tje other side a darm labourer in Shapwick near Kingston Lacy.....land owned by the Banks and not far from Badbury Rings.

But it might make me some 300,000th in line to throne

But of course the majority are English, living in England and most are down here in the Southwest, poor labourers or skilled artisans and go back as far as surnanes go. At least in records.
But go back a lot further in reality.....

[Sukhoiman]

300,000th in line to the throne made me chuckle heh.

Get to work, make it happen

[Zen9]

300,000th in line to the throne made me chuckle heh.

Get to work, make it happen

That's a lot of people who have to have.....'accidents'

[David Newton]

My family is almost all English as well.

Hampshire, Cambridgeshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, London and (via a 130 year excursion on one side) Warwickshire. Given the direct line ancestry of the surname Lepley (Le Pley) there's Huguenot in there as well and a bit of Irish Catholic as well.

No famous relations I'm aware of.

[pandion]

My family is almost all English as well.

Hampshire, Cambridgeshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, London and (via a 130 year excursion on one side) Warwickshire. Given the direct line ancestry of the surname Lepley (Le Pley) there's Huguenot in there as well and a bit of Irish Catholic as well.

No famous relations I'm aware of.

As there appears to be no documented ancestry links back to before the Middle Age that can be taken seriously - how far back can we go? Early Norman times?

[Craiglxviii]

My family is almost all English as well.

Hampshire, Cambridgeshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, London and (via a 130 year excursion on one side) Warwickshire. Given the direct line ancestry of the surname Lepley (Le Pley) there's Huguenot in there as well and a bit of Irish Catholic as well.

No famous relations I'm aware of.

As there appears to be no documented ancestry links back to before the Middle Age that can be taken seriously - how far back can we go? Early Norman times?

There certainly are surviving documented links; church and parish records of births, deaths, marriages and baptisms across England & Wales are quite well recorded- as it surprised me to find out.

It’s true that a lot depends on area and time. How many churches in a given area for example. I was lucky in that Wales had/ has a church for every tiny little hamlet in every valley, some only a few miles away from each other, and they mostly kept their records intact. And those are now mostly digitised.

I plotted the birth/death/marriage/baptism locations of the Welsh side of my family to c.1560, and they didn’t stray outside of a 20-mile radius circle. Many lines of the family lived and worked on the same farm, under the same church for multiple generations.

[Nik_SpeakerToCats]

One of my elder cousins spent decades then much of her retirement assembling our family tree.

When she died, adopted daughter trashed the lot...

[MikeKozlowski]

...My Dad did a LOT of work nailing down our family tree (the Kozlowski/Szelminski side, anyways) but when he got sick, he was the only one who knew where most of the info was. It's not likely we're going to recover it.

One thing we did talk about was my great great grandfather Pawel Szelminski, who was an NCO in the Imperial German Army. Discovered that Pawel decided to emigrate but still had a few years left on his enlistment. Asked for an early out, and was told to shut up and get back to his post.

He therefore decided to leave anyways.

Dad had done a lot of work tracing his duty records, and finally traced them.

To Dresden.

Mike

[David Newton]

My family is almost all English as well.

Hampshire, Cambridgeshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, London and (via a 130 year excursion on one side) Warwickshire. Given the direct line ancestry of the surname Lepley (Le Pley) there's Huguenot in there as well and a bit of Irish Catholic as well.

No famous relations I'm aware of.

As there appears to be no documented ancestry links back to before the Middle Age that can be taken seriously - how far back can we go? Early Norman times?

How far can you go back? Depends on who you're talking about and where.

Ordinary people in England? Start of parish registers at earliest. 1538. However many parish registers start long afterwards so often lines peter out in the 17th or even early 18th centuries.

Aristocracy or gentry in England? Norman conquest or perhaps a little earlier than that.

Royalty in England? 600s or 700s tops.

Other European countries are similar, depending on exactly when parish registers start etc.

For Europe there's a hard stop around 600 or perhaps 550. Even for royalty the records break then. No Roman gens has been linked to medieval records. None.

There is only one part of the world with actual proper, continuous records going back as far as the equivalent of classical antiquity: China. People really can trace their lines back to Confuscius for example.

[rtoldman]

researching my fathers line struck gold in a certain section of northeast england with pretty clear church records back to the early 1500s. DNA tests reveal a significant scandinavian ancestry. Soooo - a reasonable extraction is that said vikings came in and reproduced with local women?? Im going to guess peasant roots from north of Hadrians wall meets peasant roots from adventurous viking. For 900 years the peasants reproduced and here i am. a peasant.

[pandion]

My family is almost all English as well.

Hampshire, Cambridgeshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, London and (via a 130 year excursion on one side) Warwickshire. Given the direct line ancestry of the surname Lepley (Le Pley) there's Huguenot in there as well and a bit of Irish Catholic as well.

No famous relations I'm aware of.

As there appears to be no documented ancestry links back to before the Middle Age that can be taken seriously - how far back can we go? Early Norman times?

How far can you go back? Depends on who you're talking about and where.

Ordinary people in England? Start of parish registers at earliest. 1538. However many parish registers start long afterwards so often lines peter out in the 17th or even early 18th centuries.

Aristocracy or gentry in England? Norman conquest or perhaps a little earlier than that.

Royalty in England? 600s or 700s tops.

Other European countries are similar, depending on exactly when parish registers start etc.

For Europe there's a hard stop around 600 or perhaps 550. Even for royalty the records break then. No Roman gens has been linked to medieval records. None.

Thanks!

Your information agrees, more or less, with the situation in Scandinavia. Christening and the emergence of a local nobility happened some centuries later than in GB and central Europe. A parallell source, at least in Sweden, was property registers, another one protocols from clerical inspections that listed every person domiciled at the inspected farm (eqv). A common problem is not only the destruction by fire of records (accidents, plunder, warfare) but also the often limited writing ability of the record keepers, including latin. No printed text or spell/grammar checking in those days!