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My head was spinning with all the various positions and honorary jobs associated with the Queen and the royal household. I found myself getting reinterested in some of my usually ignored family lines that supposedly connect to various noble or royal families. I sometimes wonder how accurate some of the research was, but a few lines seem to be pretty solid. I have a "Constable of England" (the de Bohuns) that I figured was just a royal policeman of some sort, but they were like the commander in chief of the royal armies. I found one line that looks to be a leap of faith. Another one seems to be creative lineage in the far distant past, but it seems to be more accurate in later times. It tries to connect to William the Conqueror by way of a cousin and therefore a common ancestor. If you squint and hold your tongue just right, you might see it.
My head was spinning with all the various positions and honorary jobs associated with the Queen and the royal household. I found myself getting reinterested in some of my usually ignored family lines that supposedly connect to various noble or royal families. I sometimes wonder how accurate some of the research was, but a few lines seem to be pretty solid. I have a "Constable of England" (the de Bohuns) that I figured was just a royal policeman of some sort, but they were like the commander in chief of the royal armies. I found one line that looks to be a leap of faith. Another one seems to be creative lineage in the far distant past, but it seems to be more accurate in later times. It tries to connect to William the Conqueror by way of a cousin and therefore a common ancestor. If you squint and hold your tongue just right, you might see it.
I guess you can get lucky. I don't have any royalty. The best I have is on each side of the family there are guys who came over with William the Conquerer. One was Constable of ? appointed by William. They had French surnames and built castles all over England. I visited their most famous castle up in Yorkshire one time. By the time one of their women married into my family it was in the mid 1800s and some of the rest of them had become degenerates who were getting arrested for fornicating by the side of the road. They would always end up in York Dungeon.
Last edited by in_newengland; 09-24-2022 at 10:52 AM..
The thing about this stuff is that by sheer mathematics, obviously, a lot of Americans would be descendants of some of the grand noble families of England in *some* way. It is however extremely difficult to actually pin down these types of relationships in terms of family trees.
What's quite common in genealogical research is that if you say come to a "Robert Smith" as a likely great great great grandfather somewhere down the line in the 18th century, and you have a rough idea of where they're from and what their birth and death year/decade was, you come across 4 or 5 possible candidates. People back then didn't have a ton of fantasy when it came to naming people and in fact families often recycled the same few names over and over. If the surname is a fairly common one at that, you may have multiple families in the same county recycling the same popular first name over and over again. So you could have a decent number of Robert Smiths in the same county living at the same time and some of the might be related, and some of them not.
Now let's say one of those Robert Smiths was a notable man in the colony, the son of a grand family of English cavaliers who could trace their lineage back to Earls and Dukes and important men at the Tudor courts, relatedto the Plantagenet dynasty etc. What happens then is that almost every current day person who comes to this "Robert Smith" junction in their research will pick this Robert Smith as their ancestor because (1) it's the one you'll most likely find further information about (2) it's a much nicer thought to be a descendant of this guy than one of the other anonymous Robert Smiths (who ironically may also have noble connections somewhere, but since you can't find out more about them, who knows?).
Once someone does this, they'll tell their kids, their cousins, their aunts/uncles, and it's 'family lore'. It's a pretty cool little piece of trivia after all that makes everyone feel pretty good about themselves. Of course, there's a pretty solid chance that it's not true. It might be true, but it quite possibly isn't.
100% peasant stock as well, My British Isles ancestors were many English Catholics, some Scots-Irish types we can't pin down, a 18th century Ulsterman, and a Welsh miner. Any "important" ancestors in these lines were forgotten, lost, never existed, or are unknown.
I do like the Queen and enjoy Royal Family clickbait, but any time I see a picture of Scotland, England, or Ireland, the first thing I think is "No wonder my ancestors got the heck out of there." No offense, I know lots of people love the place, but if "ancestral memory" is a thing, mine is telling me "Run, the King's men are after you!" and "Where the heck are all the trees?"
...if "ancestral memory" is a thing, mine is telling me "Run, the King's men are after you!" and "Where the heck are all the trees?"
Yes, I'm substantially Kerry Irish, with very sparse family records, and I inherited some genetic animosity toward the English. The Irish know how to hold a grudge. They put up with a lot of English abuse but somehow survived the famine. But the English kept better records, so my English and Scottish people are more traceable.
If there are 35 million living descendants from the Mayflower passengers, as is commonly said, the number of noble families in Europe would far outnumber that little group. The numbers of descendants would be beyond calculation -- plus, they intermarried and produced countless excess offspring that faded into the background. So, if someone says they are descended from Charlemagne or William the Conqueror or some Roman emperor, I just go with it. They probably are connected to some big wig 1000 years ago. It makes sense in the sheer numbers but also in the sense that the nobility had a better chance of living long enough to have surviving descendants than the guy out getting bashed in the head or eating wormy food. The plague wiped out whole family lines and villages, but the nobility had an advantage and kept on producing kids. Once you get back far enough into those old families you bounce around from one to another like a pinball machine. You need to greet some of it with skepticism.
A lot of the names I come across were not exceptional people, but you find someone occasionally that has a little more integrity. One somewhat noble woman married and had a number of kids and her husband died. She devoted her later life to scholarship and amassed a respectable library of (handwritten) books, and that saved them from disappearing.
Another guy was Roger Grenville, the captain of the Henry VIII's huge flagship The Mary Rose when it sank in 1545, and he drowned (probably a good thing). The unwieldy ship was engaged in a battle (having 91 guns and a crew of 415 men) and turned so sharply that it keeled over too far, and water poured into the lower gunports, and it sank. It was rediscovered in the 1970s and raised, and the surviving wreckage is preserved in a museum. There were only 35 survivors when that ship sank and having noble blood wasn't worth anything in the final results. King Henry would not have forgiven the captain for losing his flagship, so he was doomed one way or the other.
This has nothing to do with the funeral of QE2, but 12 years ago when I found out my surname at birth (pre-adoption) was King, I wondered where that came from. Later I would discover it was translated from the German Koenig, and thanks to a German genealogy database I was able to trace the line back to the 1500s in a small valley in southern Hesse. Supposedly people with this surname were "in service to the king", but I can't know who the first person was in the line who took that name, or which king he was serving. There were probably lots of kings with lots of servants, which would account for the high frequency of the surname, in both English and German.
It seems kind of cheeky though that when asked to name themselves way back when, people would just say "call me King" if they were servants.
I have always said if I’m related to royalty with my crazy family it’s gotta be Mad King George! In all honesty, truly the only reason I would like it is royalty lines are so well documented.
I do have relations who are English, their names are very common, so the William Mason in my family, could he be related to the William Mason of the peerage? Well, he could be, in reality probably not.
Back to the well documented comment, my family comes from a very, very small town, and at one point they had a newspaper. That era was amazing for all the stuff I found. It made me interested in my genealogy in that time when my interest was flagging.
And they were very well respected family of the time, so they were very well covered. A treasure trove of information. Go back to my 2nd great grandfather, and all I have is one distant cousin, who heard from another distant cousin, who heard from somebody else that a tree fell on my GGF. That very well could be true, given the fact that he did not write a will, but he had an estate that was probated. Normally if somebody got sick, they got the guy out who could write the wills to write a will. If a tree fell on him, he was just dead. There was no way he was going to be able to write a will. At this point, there was no press or death certificates so there’s no way to know if what my cousin is saying actually happened, although she believes the source she got it from. Mainly because that source is almost 100 and she would’ve gotten it from her grandfather who would’ve been alive when it happened.
__________________ Solly says — Be nice!
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one of my distant Hyatt relatives was a henchman for William the conqueror ,, we have a family crest but i dont know if that means anything ..
Solly says — Be nice!
