#3 Royal Descents, Notable Kin, and Printed Sources: A Few Summary Compendia, and the Significance of Distant Kinship
Gary Boyd Roberts
I’ve spent the past week
exploring the medieval and baronial ancestry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and
Lord Tennyson (my next "Notable Kin" column), and rereading with some initial
suggestions for his consideration for a new edition, Ralph Crandall’s Shaking
Your Family Tree. While doing this last I have been very much struck by how
many areas of our field have made massive progress–with sometimes an
authoritative single summary work–in the last decade. I covered two basic
areas--seventeenth-century New England and the century of "lost ancestors,"
1750-1850, in the 150th anniversary issue (October 1996) of The New
England Historical and Genealogical Register and the 75th anniversary issue
of The American Genealogist (July/October 1997). Among the topics
I covered were new compendia and databases, English origins studies, royal
descents, Mayflower works, multi-ancestor studies, town genealogies (all for
17th century New England), Revolutionary soldiers lists and pension abstracts,
census indexes, "mugbook" indexes, newspaper abstracts, modern biographical
data, and artifacts (for the century of "lost ancestors").
My articles
were organized mostly by chronological or area topic. Shaking Your Family
Tree is organized by type of record, and here too there have been some big
advances in the last 10 years. Many new or updated guidebooks have been
published by Genealogical Publishing Company in Baltimore, Ancestry, Inc., in
Utah, and our own NEHGS. The American Genealogical-Biographical Index,
which I discussed last week, has now reached 195 volumes (when Shaking
Your Family Tree first appeared the number of volumes was only 135), and is
almost through the alphabet. The NEHGS NEXUS has become a major
periodical, and I’m personally proud of its popularity and coverage of new kinds
of topics (my "Notable Kin" column is now appearing in an updated book version,
with volume one now available}.
Periodical indexes have been expanded
into PERSI (Periodical Source Index), Revolutionary and War of
1812 pensions have been wonderfully abstracted or indexed by Virgil D. White,
and census indexes now exist for 1860, much of 1870, and for a few western
areas beyond. For obtaining vital records, one need only consult the
International Vital Records Handbook, now in its third edition (1994), by
Thomas J. Kemp. Immigration lists have especially flowered. In addition to
Germans in America and Famine Immigrants, we now have Italians
To America and Emigrants from the Russian Empire (largely
Polish and/or Jewish). GPC finished its periodical extracts program with
Genealogies of New Jersey Families, and The Search for Missing
Friends, with thousands of Irish place origins, has now reached six volumes.
In tracing the ancestry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Lord Tennyson
I discovered that they were 9th cousins. I often say that members of the "New
England Family"are 8th-12th cousins, and my non-fans think that kinships this
distant are meaningless. They are wrong! Such relationships show us the extent
of kinship among various classes and nations, and they suggest the century in
which common ancestry for very different groups can be traced. Such kinships may
also suggest how distantly members of the same class may be related (9th cousins
was a bit more distant than I expected. The common forebear was an Elizabethan
peer). Many Americans with New England forebears in common with the Princess of
Wales are her 9th, 10th, or 11th cousins. If you only share other Elizabethan
ancestors with her father, you may be only 12th through 15th cousins. Members of
the high peerage in England are often as closely related as
Social–Register leaders are here. Diana and Charles, and Andrew and
Sarah Ferguson were 7th cousins (once removed, I think, in the case of Andrew
and Sarah). Diana and Sarah were 4th cousins and Diana and Camilla Parker Bowles
were also 7th cousins. Members of European noble houses are often 15th to 20th
cousins of many Americans through common descent from late medieval kings.
Except for some remarkable kinships through the Byzantine marriages of earlier
medieval kings, 20th to 25th cousins are probably as distant as traceable
European lineages extend. Anthropologists claim everyone on earth is a 40th
cousin. How is a topic I might discuss in another column.