,..is attracting a raft of naive folk, love ’em, but…
Columbus sailed the ocean blue
In fourteen hundred ninety-two.
Therefore the presence of a European in a place called Illinois in 1300 is quite remarkable. And the likelihood that he is a citizen of the United States is vanishingly low. The fact that his name is Sir Knight Walter Giffard is bizarre. And why do they insert ‘knight,’ as if ‘sir’ was not enough in a space-limited blank…..
Some even enter USA 10 and more times into the record, as if this helps.
Then there’s the school of thought that fills in ‘Mrs Bloody Sven’ in the spousal blank, though his actual wife may not be known. This means the rest of us have to erase it. And every spouse where the real answer is FNU LNU (first name unknown last name unknown) or just —heaven save us—leave it blank. In case someone has the real answer. I am, however, left with the image of a white-haired, apron-wearing Nordic lady with a spoon…Mrs. Bloody Sven.
Then there is the latest minimalist trend. “Let’s just toss ALL the things we don’t understand.” This leaves us with plain old Maude Pitres. The fact that she is a titled lady whose real name (to distinguish her from all the other de Pitreses) was Maud Fitz Walter de Pitres, which is short for Matilda daughter of the Walter who administered or was born inor whose near ancestor administered or was born in the town of Pitres. Which happens to be in France. Maude Pitres. Facepalm. Facepalm. Facepalm.
Found an interesting little tidbit today, a little ditty to the effect that the Crocker family, the Crewe family and the Coppelstone family (3 Devon families) were standing on their property to meet William the Conqueror. A couple of the Devon lines go back to personal names like Wiganus, etc, which I’m moved to ask—could these be Saxon landholders, still in place a couple of hundred years later. In-trust-in’, as Jane is wont to say.
Meanwhile I struggle through not just Maude Pitres, but a shocking lot of other alterations.
New customers for the service. More names entered. More records put in. All to the good. But oh, my, you just have this image of a couple of people who’ve never motored beyond their county line trying to figure out the way to fill in those blanks, and who add USA because that’s where they are!
I wonder if the Crocker I went to school with was a descendant of Saxons (or new Normans) who were there to see Guillaume Le Conquisant.
Then again, if there -were- a European fellow running about in not-yet-Illinois in 1300, someone really has some ‘splainin’ to do…and might need that TARDIS key….
But Mrs. Bloody Sven, now, there was a formidable hûswîf if ever there was one! I hear she was skilled with battle axe, frying pan, rolling pin, and broadsword, all while a mere slip of a shield-maiden. That, and she could sing Wagner while making Apfelstrüdel.
There was a reason Mr. Bloody Sven was so good a-Viking, and now we know!
I’m also thinking of the family in the sauna in Frozen…. :grins:
— I suspect some of that faulty data is also leftovers from bots or from pranksters. Sigh. — But yes, way too many who have no idea what happened before they were born or outside of 20 miles from where they were born.
It’s not too far a stretch to suppose there’d still be Saxons using very Saxon names, 200 or even 300 years after the Conquest. I’d expect a little sound and spelling change, but the two cultures were still not merged yet. But by then, thorn looked enough like a y that the real y was dotted, w had mostly replaced wynn, and yogh was causing confusion between g, y, and z, and even h/gh/ch. and y ü had changed to an i sound; not to mention odd Norman attempts to spell Saxon words in gode frensche….
Or the tendency to Latinize local names to seem learned and respectable: Alcuin in Italy, instead of Alcwine, Aldus Manutius instead of Aldo Manuzzio….
“Crocker, Crewys and Coplestone, when the Conqueror came were at home.”
That shouldn’t be taken literally. It only means that those three names already existed at the time of William the Conqueror.
Oops, not sure why I took that too literally. I should catch such things, after all.
From the Domesday Book online:
The great majority of Domesday landholders came from northern France, but there were still a few Anglo-Saxons and Danes. Only one member of the old nobility still possessed sizable estates – Thorkill of Arden, who had lands in Warwickshire.
Many formerly independent Anglo-Saxon and Danish thanes and their descendants appear in Domesday as the under-tenants of Norman lords. One man called Toli held lands at Cowley in Oxfordshire until 1086 when he became under-tenant of Norman baron Miles Crispin Another, Saewold had kept property worth £10 in the same county but had to mortgage half to Robert d’Oilly.
That was 20 years after the Norman conquest, but over time there would have been more land holders of Anglo-Saxon origin, due to intermarriage, awarding estates for services rendered, families dying out, buying and selling of estates, etc.
Neat! Thanks!
Very neat. — I wonder if, at the time, Saewold was long [æ:] / diphthong [æi] or long [a:]. I’d presume the former, since it looks like Modern English Seawold, Seewold, Sewold.
Toli? — Almost like Tully, and maybe the word-ancestor thereof? Hmm….
—–
Yesterday, while looking at names (to get ideas for characters), I came across the derivation of Colby, Col- + -by, where -by is just the preposition “by” and “Col-” there could either be Coal, by the coal (town, place, or mine).
However, what I thought was more interesting, was that this said the Col- root was from Koli, an old name or nickname meaning someone dark or swarthy, coal-like, probably in hair or complexion, but given the Germanic source (Sexon or Danish) probably not from below the Mediterranean, probably just a very darkly tanned northern European. (N.B. – The source was via BehindTheName.com, which I think does not always get the etymologies quite right, but is still always interesting.) It was probably too early for it to be Coal- + -y, “Coaly,” because the -y at that time would have been -ic or -ih, a noun-to-adjective marker, like -ly was -lic, -lyc, -lice, -lyce, from “like” : “Coal-ly” from “Col-lyce,” Coal-like, where -lyc is an adverb marker or the word like.
Oh,and don’t forget the braids down to her knees!
And yes the frustration level looms large. Folk seem generally okay with sons having the same name as dad, but seem mystified that a daughter could have the same name as mom, or grandma, so I have more than one instance where someone has married their mother, aunt, niece or granddaughter. I also have several Mrs. So-and-so, but I wish I had Mrs. Bloody Sven!
It just drives home gaps involving teaching critical thinking and how to actually do research.
Name confusion: My mother always had a subscription to her university’s magazine, Sallyport. One day, I got a call from a young lady, a current student at the university, who was updating records. Did my mother still want the subscription? Yes, of course. But there was some question over my mom’s name and the young lady wanted to confirm this. I think this got into mom’s maiden name versus her married name, as though the subscription had never been changed to her married name.
So, of course, I gave my mother’s name and explained the one was her maiden name, with which she’d graduated, and the other was her married name. So I asked the young lady to send the magazine to my mom with her name as she used it then, her given name, her maiden name as her middle name, and her married name as her last name. But of course, I simply said the three names in order.
Oh, but this caused much confusion on the other end of the phone! Thompson Thompson? Asked the young lady, as though suddenly suspecting terrible things. No, I said, and repeated the name and the explanation. It developed the young lady did not know what a maiden name or married name were, and she was not listening or not getting the explanation, which I was trying to keep short and simple. Meanwhile, I was wondering how she could not know this and be attending a very good university.
The magazine arrived thereafter addressed to my mother as (her given name) Thompson Thompson. I think she or I called to correct this.
At the time, I was a young adult, late 20’s, so I was fairly puzzled why a smart college girl would not understand the concept, despite attempting to explain it twice and correct her about three times, with only further confusion ensuing. Heh.
I feel fairly sure she left the conversation completely mystified and convinced I was the child of an illicit, inbred sort of marriage. Ah, no, not so. My last name’s not remotely Thompson. It’s either English or German or Dutch; and if English, then it’s from an English dialect in the north near the Scots border. My last name’s unusual. So the young lady should’ve been able to understand that my mother would’ve wanted it delivered to my mother’s married name, but this was beyond the young lady’s grasp.
I also wonder how she did with other calls she made. The trouble is, she was a Journalism or English major…..
So…sometimes, it’s the comprehension level, the concentration level, as much as the basic knowledge of a subject.
I ran into one case, back when Ancestral File was where donated data went, where someone had somehow merged grandson with his grandfather of the same name (I think it was the Caleb Carrs of RI, but can’t swear to it.). I don’t know if that ever got straightened out. It’s one reason to use the primary records whenever you can, and leave the speculation and the wild-ass guessing to the people who are truly clueless about research.
Wiki is not a totally trustable reference, but it’s fast, and can at least help sort out which of 23 children attributed to one woman may be somebody else’s, or bogus. I’ve long said that Ancestry should sponsor a One Likely True genealogy for people like Charlemagne and George Washington, that you can pull down and plug in, then manipulate it in the ordinary way that lets people put Aunt Suzie into his offspring if they really want to—but if people could just get AT a reasonably accurate account certified to be the commonly-held descent—it would save so much hair-pulling.
There’s Leo’s site: http://www.genealogics.org/index.php , which may be close enough.
Also the Henry project, which is covering the ancestry of Henry II of England in detail: http://sbaldw.home.mindspring.com/hproject/henry.htm
The Foundation for Medieval Genealogy here: http://fmg.ac/
Adding, for books, Ancestral Roots (Frederick Weis et al) is fairly good (I mostly use the 7th edition; the 8th added some errors (!) and is printed in sans-serif, which makes it unnecessarily hard to read). I’d also advise getting Magna Carta Sureties, which is effectively a companion to it. Don’t get Roderick Stuart’s book: it’s full of errors, as well as badly organized. (How bad is it? The publisher recalled the first edition.)
Neither Ancestry nor Wikipedia may be totally trustworthy, but having seen what gets into Ancestry, my sister and I give the edge to the Wikipedia data.
‘Sir knight’ (or Sir First Last Knight) was one of those things that they were trying to get people to do for Ancestral File, complicated by not everyone who is entitled to be called Sir being a knight.
I leave off the titles on the stuff going to Ancestry. Let them as wants titles add them. I don’t send the medieval stuff at all – for one thing, there isn’t any software that can handle the names well. (Family names, territorial names, patronymics, nicknames, all at the same time, and territorial and nicknames change every so often.) It’s bad enough dealing with Quebec and dit-names. Which current software also doesn’t handle well.
Where one really needs extra identification in the Campbells! Duncan Campbell begat Colin Campbell begat Duncan Campbell begat Colin Campbell begat Duncan Campbell begat Colin Campbell begat…
Thomas Baty, Arthur Baty, Thomas Baty, Arthur Baty, Thomas Baty, Arthur Baty. Or Samuel Pickering, Samuel Pickering, Samuel Pickering, Samuel Pickering, Samuel Pickering.
I put them in which at least gives other users the option, and in families when you have 4 Johns and 3 Gregorys—it’s sometimes helpful in sorting them out.
And somebody has now input Mr. Brown’s Da Vinci code suppositions into the Merovingians. Not to mention the person who has some sort of strange connection to King David.
Unfortunately, people will blithely copy these into their trees.
If King David is now listed, then won’t be long before someone traces their ancestry back to Adam and Eve.
🙂
But Pooh-Bah (in the Mikado) outdoes them all: “I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal atomic globule.”
No doubt everyone at all interested in the subject will like this article:
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/07/charlemagnes-dna-and-our-universal-royalty/
My personal favorite? Children born 100 years before their parents! Or 100 years after they died. Hello, people – check the dates! Also GreenWyvern – more than one person has already traced their genealogy back to Adam and Eve. I followed one line back (not in my tree, someone else’s) who purportedly had taken it back to #1 and they followed some twists and turns that I couldn’t quite keep up with (including Thor and Odin along the way). And when it finally reached Adam and Eve, it continued on to God – and Mrs. God!
So for this guy the Trinity has become a Quadrinity!
Actually, I can understand why the Church made such big deal about heresy in the Middle Ages and later. Most people were illiterate and uneducated, and if the Church hadn’t gone to great lengths to keep the story straight, it would have quickly diverged into all kinds of weird and wonderful beliefs and the whole religion would have fragmented.
The Council of Nicaea had to be called to get the doctrine straight to begin with. Identification of Christ with the Sun God seems to have been a big issue in the early church. As late as the 5th century AD, Pope Leo I was denouncing ‘people who call themselves Christians’ but publicly bow down to the rising Sun, even on the steps of the church. And Augustine wrote a whole long essay explaining why Christ was NOT the same as the Sun God.
Interestingly enough, I did come across a British reference book called “The Dictionary of Biography and Mythology”. Mixing truth and fiction?
Original source documents can conflict on dates, spellings, even places. Add in that it could be common back then to name a child as a nakesake of some relative or friend, and things could get easily confusing. Then add in two or three relatives attempting genealogy and a very distant (unknown) cousin doing research on the name, and it gets still more curious.
At some point before the American Revolutionary War, IIRC, in the very early 1700’s until shortly before Independence, the colonies themselves went through a few border changes, principally toward the mountains (Appalachians) and the interior of the continent, then mostly unexplored / unsettled by the English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, and Germans who made up the majority of the (English) Colonies.
This meant that parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania (and I think others) changed borders and became (surprise) no longer in the original colony. Or further colonies were created, such as Carolina’s separation in two, North and South. (West Virginia divided off during the later Civil War.)
So, into this situation, my two first European ancestors (in my family name’s paternal line) arrived in the American Colonies, apparently having left a Dutch or German port, and with what appears to be an oddly dialectal German, Dutch, or English spelling for the last name, and Philip or Phillip and John or Johan or Johann arrived, IIRC, in 1755. (1750’s, at any rate.) They were, arguably, either father and son or uncle and nephew or brothers, because the dates then and later differ, as little as a ten year gap, but generally more. They were apparently literate, too. (That last name is spelled Wh- instead of W or V or Hv or Hw. But apparently, that happened even in some German spellings.) — They first settled in what’s now Pennsylvania, then moved down-country over a period of years (wives and children at some point) and their descendants eventually ended up around what was then known as (Old) Martin’s Station, near Cumberland Gap, and later renamed as Rose Hill, Virginia, where the descendant at that time bought what would be the family farm on or before the 1820’s, IIRC. One important clue my dad was able to confirm from an old pre-Revolutionary War map was the story that the family had come from “Crab Orchard.” (There were several “Crab” towns. The word is the same as crab apples or crab trees (crab apple trees, that is).
But even knowing the origins (the female distant cousin and my dad both had looked at the data, once dad got copies from her) — It is still difficult to know quite what was going on with Phillip and Johann / John. The consensus was that they were father and son, based on later recorded data. The same family name was given, and they later both married and had children.
Then, just recently, I ran across a spelling that is, by etymology, completely separate, but ~might~ be confused and conflated with my family’s last name. — But the two roots are such that most Dutch and German speakers would know the difference immediately, and most English and American speakers would understand it if they knew the key difference in the roots: Whis- (white) versus (Dutch) Huis- (house). I believe the Dutch pronunciation is sufficiently different to be clear, except to American / English speakers. (The -UI- is an ooh, yew, üh, or oo-ih, I think. I’m not sure of the Dutch pronunciation there.) — But the spelling used by my family since the first two got here has always been with a Wh-, and the similarity to Huis- surprised me because I’d never considered it until I ran into a last name in print.
I’m still presuming Phillip and Johann were father and son, and the one or two instances of 10 or 12 year age differences are flukes, since later dates given were, IIRC, greater. — Personal Project: To go over the box of data again and find another set of records (including a mid-1800’s photo from my maternal grandfather’s line).
Our name in America has two forms, and we’re not the same family: there’s the Kirsch (Cherry) family in (I think) Pennsylvania—a lot of Germans ended up in NY and Pennsylvania, some of them Palatine immigrants (Jane has those)—but we’re English, once French. The earliest form given in the records is de Che’rei and de Chereis, but if you look at them as to how they got to Normandy, it was not with William I in 1066, but fleeing Charles the Mad, house of Capet, ca 1368-1422, who was having a major set-to with the Duke of Burgundy (remember The Vagabond Prince and ‘To Hell with Burgundy?’) who wanted the throne. Well, the house of the de Courtenays had wanted the throne too, and had a ghost of a claim, but with Burgundy assassinating people in the streets and chaos breaking out, part of the de Courtenays had kited over to central England and set up there in Leicestershire. Funny thing, a much smaller ally of the lordly de Courtenays (but married in to the edge of the family) was a batch from the Cher district, next to the de Courtenays’ land in France. When Charles the Mad lost it, definitively, and began attacking his own courtiers and guards, one of the de Chers managed to get Charles’ permission to go check on de Cher property in Normandy. This was apparently a ruse, to get him out of France and into Normandy and very quickly into England, where, funny thing, the de Courtenays were doing well for themselves, and had set up in Leicestershire…and lo and behold the de Chereis family show up, to live in Leicestershire for a considerable while. They show up next in Berkshire. The de Courtenays left in France fade away in an all-female line, and the de Chers are seen no more in France. And poor Charles the Mad finally expired, and was followed by another Charles, VII. This was an era of constant war, and the battle of Agincourt was fought amid Burgundy siding with the English and with the French court in a constant ferment of betrayal, assassination, and mayhem.
When our lot, by now de Cherrie, fell out with the English government (there is actually a song about Squire Cherry cutting down a locally favored tree, and another tale about one of the family deliberately trying to do in the English king in a local hunt by riding like a lunatic—apparently he was a better horseman than the English king—I think William, of William of Orange and Mary—the weirdness is that William DID die after falling off a horse and breaking his collarbone, so either William was given to falling off horses, or there was a REAL GOOD reason my umpteenth-great grandfather moved the whole family from Berkshire to Ireland. The family lived briefly in Ireland and married local folk, but apparently they couldn’t stay out of politics there either: they moved to the Carolinas, but ended up in another civil war, aka the Revolutionary War—at which point they began living always over the border of the nascent US—in Florida before statehood, in Texas while it was Mexican, and in Oklahoma with the Sac-Fox before Oklahoma became a state.
Ah, Agincourt! Where my 1st cousin 19x beat the French against very big odds. He should have called it quits when he was ahead, but no – he had to go back for 2 more campaigns and the third time was definitely not a charm! Not for him, anyway… And yes, a period in time when you couldn’t trust your own brother – with reason!