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My father's family (his paternal line) is also from Ipswich, going back generations upon generations. They were Puritans. My grandfather was born there.
My sister, who has all his genealogical paperwork, says we are related to the Spencer family (Diana), so I guess I am sort of related to them, too if what she says is true. Given what we know about them, I'm not sure I'd necessarily want people to know that.
Maybe we are distant cousins?
I'm pretty sure my ex mother in law told me at one time that my son is related to Princess Di too. His few times great grandfather is a Spencer from Ireland.
I'm pretty sure my ex mother in law told me at one time that my son is related to Princess Di too. His few times great grandfather is a Spencer from Ireland.
It also seems as though people seem to latch on to those few very researched royal lines and connect the dots. It’s like blindly adding trees in ancestry. It’s like “someone must have researched that...it’s correct...right?” Like I said, you find that one person and then you can add 15th cousins because the link is out there. I wish it was that easy to find my Irish/Scottish/Canadian great great grandfather.
My sixth great grandfather had 25 kids, pretty much all of them grew up to have a bunch of kids. His son, my 5th GGF, died at 32, only had five. I’m now finding cousins who married (very distant) cousins, because of the tree branches winding together.
Considering the high percentage of English in my DNA, (46%) even after my family tree having tons of roots to Colonial America, it wouldn’t surprise me to find some English royalty, much for the same reason. The queen consorts generally had a boatload of kids, and those kids had kids... and we go on from there.
I remember reading somewhere, each generation we go back, the parents expand exponentially. As in, we have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents and 16 great greats. If you could trace back generations to I believe Charlemagne, the number of greats you have exceed the total population of the world at that time.
So yeah, pretty much you’re going to hit a royal. Maybe not English, maybe from a royal court that is no more, but I firmly believe you will hit it.
Although, my focus has always been to find the first person who hit American shores in each line. So I will probably never find mine.
Me too, I can trace my family down to the 17th century and they were all peasants. Now, people in the American continent are related not to nobility, but to royalty...quite strange.
I can trace my fathers side back to Charlemagne and William the Conqueror through a gateway ancestor. I can legitimately trace the line to the gateway ancestor who came to Canada from France in the 1600's. From there societies have traced her back further. My more recent as in from the 1600's and forward were basically working class with a few upper crust thrown in like one who's father was one of several pharmacists for Catherine De Medici and one who was a friend of Samuel de Champlain. Go far back enough and I think most whose ancestors came over from England or France can trace back to royalty. Go even further back and everyone came from the same people.
One of my lines is supposed to descend from a mythical Viking Sea King from around AD 450. Another supposedly comes from Niall of the Nine Hostages who might never have even existed. Good stories but...
1) Continental Europe had different laws and customs about marrying down vs England and Scotland. It is more common in England and Scotland.
Gateway ancestors from England were often lower sons or black sheep sons of gentry. A few generations up, the wife of someone was the lower daughter of a lord to a wealthy commoner...
2) Most kings had numerous mistresses and more numerous romps with the lower classes. There is no paper trail for the romps with the maids. Most of the mistresses were also unrecorded.
3) As for Mohammed, if you have ancestry in the Iberian peninsula especially you have a drastically higher probability of decendancy as Moorish invaders viewed Christian females as fair game. No paper trail exists for the vast majority of these offspring.
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Solly says — Be nice!
