Paternal great-grandfather/maternal 1
The promise of this blog is that any writing will be short. Well, I guess it’s time to break promises, and I trust you’ll find it interesting.
From time to time, I dig into genealogy to see if I can find something new. Revisiting familysearch.org, I realize my rudimentary family tree has grown in my absence. How? Why? No clue.
The maternal lines go back only to my grandparents.
My surname (paternal line; somewhat obscure French) has been my main interest, but it only goes back to 1832. The family history of seven Huguenot jeweler brothers fleeing France would have put them there long before that. (In a strange coincidence, when I moved to a small town in the Taunus mountains of West Germany in 1981, with my first piece of mail the postal worker asked if I was related to the recently deceased shepherd who kept his flock on the hillside opposite, with the exact same surname.)
My middle name, Clayton, I can trace back only to 1719.
So that, I thought, was that: the interesting stuff stops with my 5th great-grandfather.
But I started following the line of his wife, Abigail Powell (b 1717). Soon I was tumbling back to the 14th century, 13th…until it stops with Pierrede Rode, 1020-1080. Wow.
I started following Marmaduke Constable (1275-1378: 103 years old?). The first line breaks into the 10th century, though a grandfather being born the same year as his grandson does raise an eyebrow.
(Reassuring to note that people born over 1,000 years ago are deceased.)
Another line and we start hitting kings and queens.
That line only goes back to 778, but along the way we’ve picked up six kings, a princess, and a queen. Not bad, even if I’d never heard of them. And some great names too: Eudo I Munby Mumby Mundebi has a certain ring to it.
Another line goes back to Eadwulf I, king of Northumbria (670-717), and adds five more kings and a lord.
A line starting with Flocwald of Asgard adds my first ancestors who lived before the birth of Christ. I can’t be sure which are kings but hell, Cerdic, Alfred the great…at this point I think it’s safe that they’re basically all royalty, else why would they be remembered?
Here we get our first taste of red flags. I will consider that these types of red flags render a line unreliable (a lot have red flags for “no standardized” birth or death place, but otherwise their dates work). This is going back 73 generations.
Another line ends with the King and Queen of the Picts, but Wikipedia names the first King of the Picts as Vipoig (died c. AD 341). I don’t think too many people in the 4th century lived to 91 (but what do I know?).
Another Irish line.
Another: 0ili0ll Oaisfhiaclach ‘crooked teeth’ Macconnla 77th high king of Ireland. But he’s listed elsewhere as living two centuries earlier, which corresponds with the dates of his son the long-hair dude. BTW I was always told my crooked teeth resulted from my mother’s large teeth and father’s narrow jaw, but maybe it goes back further?
One line goes back to Gotfrid, the Duke of Alemannia in Bavaria. Somewhere along in here we’ve got Normandy, Bayeaux, King Ludwig I….
Another goes back to Rome.
And another.
