Pushed a button I should’na pushed.
Me mum’s entire line from great-great gran went blooie. Vanished. Especially nuisanceful is losing the line in your DNA record…and this one carries my MtDNA.
One of the good things about Family Tree software (Ancestry.com) is that gone is not gone, if you can find the thread.
Thirty minutes of searching (the descendants of Eliphalet Maxwell are occasionally confused) turned up the critical Eliphalet (you would not believe there was more than one person in Massachusetts named Eliphalet, but there was, and one ancestress may have been married to two of them…still have to straighten that out!) —and I got it. Blink! There they are all back again.
I hate it when that happens. Family Tree is good at finding duplicate ancestors, ie people you’re related to more than once, or three or four times,—which can save you a LOT of copying (x-great-grandfather Thomas Wilson appears twice, with ALL his predecessors, and the same wife with all of hers) but if you run that utility and merge two people who shouldn’t be merged, because (thanks to the Julian/Gregorian calendar mess) you frequently have a person being born in 1722 and 1723. And the fact that parish records often take April as the first month of the new year just makes everything lovelier still, in terms of Are these two people the same person? So when the program asks if Eliphalet born in x year is the same Eliphalet born in x plus or minus a year—and you say ‘yes’, you can end up copying one record over another and just making a mess.
Caution, Will Robinson.
And don’t panic. Nothing gets erased—just…disconnected. And you have to find the button and buttonhole.
Ah yes, the detach command can certainly play havoc with your tree. Been there and done that but not with so much elan.
That’s not the problem. The problem is computer data is far more ephemeral than people realize–never expect “it is somewhere on the web.” I still have papers from highschool (Aspies are like that.), and readable, usable, parchment documents a millenium old are not uncommon. But data on 8″ floppies from my S-100 CP/M days may still be there, all but completely unusable.
Thanksgiving morning Freddy’s had a “door buster sale” that included 8GB USB “thumb drives” for $4.99. Not “thumb” though, not even fingernail! There’s less than 1/2″ of gubbins beyond the USB connector. I got half a dozen, and I’m plugging one into a port on the back of all my main boxes. They’re short enough to be in no physical danger, always there, available for important file backups. Good idea! 😉
I’m just happy to see that someone else knows what S-100 and CP/M mean. 🙂
In the Tree, I’m backed up considerably, having a file on Ancestry itself which COULD have restored it, but scarily. That ‘reverse polarity’ procedure is not fool-proof, I’m highly suspicious. There’s another version on Carbonite. And I have about 20 backups of a sequential nature…all of them backups of the state of the thing at a certain date with the potential for losing also-critical recent work. Tying the links back up was certainly the least scary of several propositions! Databases, like wizards, are cranky and eccentric creatures prone to making things disappear.
Ghu help you if you get ‘database schema changed’. That tends to result in changes you can’t find. (FTM needs a ‘date last edited’ record for each person.)
I’m like you … tree sync’d to Ancestry, tree, sync file, media folder and many backups out to Carbonite. Once in a while I’ll send a backup copy to Dropbox to move to my laptop. And every so often I stuff a GEDCom out to Rootsweb.
I download the Gedcom file about once or twice a month – that gets fed to my more-reliable program, because FTM is not as good as it should be. The file on Ancestry is the primary backup, but I can pull it down when I need to (which happens every so often, when Murphy decides to kill the local file). It just takes a few days to get the media downloaded (and lately, some of those have been wonky).
I got an extra chuckle reading the comics today:
“He won’t come when I call him. He stays out all night. And when he does come home all he wants to do is eat and sleep with me.”
I was thinking nobody here needs to be told the punchline! 🙂 🙂 🙂
Richard III is in the news again! The tree has really come apart!
REally interesting. I wish they would give the actual DNA indicators, for those of us who actually read these things!
They do! Just follow the link to the paper.
They’re talking about it at soc.genealogy.medieval, trying to figure out where the cuckoo is in the Y-DNA. If it’s on the York line, it’s most likely that Edmund of Langley wasn’t the biological father of Richard of Cambridge (best guess: John Holand of Exeter, and note that Edmund’s second wife was a Holand). It wouldn’t affect the claim to the throne, because that was through Lionel of Antwerp, Edmund’s older brother. Unfortunately there aren’t any known male-line descendants of John Holand. They could try to do DNA testing on Edmund, though. (Good luck getting that done!)
Hey, Edmund’s my grandfather!
If you lose 300 years of ancestors, does it invalidate their posthumous baptisms?
Lol. Good question 🙂
One wonders:
Are the ancestors then sufficiently peeved and about to haunt you? Should one appease the ancestors in some non-religion-specific way?
Cranberry sauce, perhaps. (It would probably work for a large number of one’s own ancestors. Heh.)
On the other hand, perhaps it might be desirable to, ah, misplace certain ancestors, say. At least temporally, if not paleologically, geographically, or anthropologically.
I like most of my family, among those I know of, but hmm, it seems my extended family are more “distant” relatives than I’d thought, in terms of communications and visiting, say. (‘Nuff said, grumble….) This leads one not to think as well of them as one used to.
However, I’m sure there are relatives, ancestors, I would’ve very mjuch liked to have known, if it had been possible. (Though in some cases, we’d have had to learn each other’s languages, or have a handy universal translator / babelfish / translator microbes.)
—–
A few months back, I was looking for “good names” for characters, adn I looked at unusual historical period names.
Someone, somewhere in the US in the 1800’s, named their child (boy or girl unspecified) … Surrender. A child names Surrender.
I don’t recall the article, to give a source link. it was a blog post about historical names, and quoted parish/church birth and baptismal records. These were primarily conservative Protestant names, but I don’t recall if the article said they were Quaker or other people fond of giving names with a symbolic, idealistic meaning. (Such as Temperance, Makepeace, etc.)
That name stood out for me. There was no last name and no indication if it was given to a boy or a girl. It was, if memory serves, prior to the Civil War.
It seemed very odd to me why anyone would name their child “Surrender.” (To or from what or whom? Why?) Imagine going through life being named Surrender. — The only reasoning I could think of was an exhortation to “surrender to God, to God’s will,” or similarly. I could also see it being used by pacifists, say. But it still seems a very unusual thing to name a child.
I couldn’t help but wonder what the story was behind that naming, and what the child grew up to be like, with such a name. Heh, he or she might have to become stubborn and the type not to surrender, just to deal with that name. Assuming, of course, he or she didn’t forever after choose a handy nickname.
(Note: This was not an Indian (as in, from India) name. I knew an Indian or Pakistani girl in high school named Surrindar, but that’s clearly of separate derivation. I don’t know what it means in Sanskrit or Hindi. That is to say, the Indian name does not mean Surrender in English.)
Submitted for your edification and bemusement. Now you, too, will likely wonder about the name.
—–
This morning, when I got a haircut, the shop (as always) had someone new. (They rotate people through there like nobody’s business.
Her name was “Jonta,” pronounced, “Jon-‘tay,” a legacy name from an aunt, and not Shanté or Shanti. (This reminds me to look up those, which have both African and separate Biblical roots. Jonta said it was rare, but she’s run into a couple of other people with that name, with that or other spellings. So we talked a little about names. Her daughter was named Deshay (I didn’t get the spelling), and she said that was from her or her husband’s side of the family, so also a legacy name carried down. She presumed it was a made-up name, but I said I’d see if I could find out anything, in case I can remember to tell her next time.
In looking up names (to name characters), I’ve discovered there’s a big trend lately for names with -aden / -aiden / -ayden on the end. Aidan, Hayden, Kaden, Braden, Jadon are all actual historical names, but apparently Paden is made-up, along with others. But ~why~ the ending should be so popular, a fad, I don’t know.
However, it’s no longer uncommon for kids to get “made-up” names because they “sound good,” without any real derivation. — I suppose that’s a good enough reason. If the name “soudns good,” then I suppose it is. (It works for science fiction, after all….)
I also like that old idea of giving a name based on an idealist notion, something to live up to, a good trait. — I think I’ve mellowed about “hippie” style names too. Heh.
…Just random musings, I guess, but the genealogy topic put me in mind of it.
My first name isn’t Benjamin, my middle name, the name I go by, Ben. My first name is one of those that has “switched genders” over the generations. So I often get mail to Ms., Miss, Mrs. myself, and occasionally, sample products which, really, I cannot use. The name is apparently unisex in its country of origin. But it was my dad’s name, and his paents “liked the name” and had heard or seen it somewhere. I, however, grew up with anyone expecting to see a girl instead of a boy, and then giving my name, the name I go by. When filling out forms, this ~always~ causes problems. The people who like to make and track forms never think of this sort of thing. They think only of going by one’s first name, a middle initial, and one’s family name, the last name, which gets listed, paradoxically, though more logically, first.
Moral of that story: When naming a child, give the child the name he or she will go by as his or her first name, not the middle name, and make sure it is gender-appropriate or gender-neutral (very neutral if so).
Then there was the Chinese boy I went to junior high and high schol with. His Americanized given name became York, instead of his actual Chinese given name, Yung-Hsing. (That HS is a sound midway between SH and the palatalized, soft CH of German ich, night, Liebchen, etc.)
I don’t think he ever had problems with any Lancasters or Tudors, though…. 😉
But are they ancestors? The frequency of “false paternity” is said to be 1-2%. I suppose so, but it’s a bit mind-boggling to think that one or two of every 100 people you see isn’t out of the father on his/her birth certificate. (Some knowingly by the “father” no doubt.)
So if, most generously to one’s grandmothers, one takes the probability of your father being who he’s supposed to be is 99%, over the 16 generations of so, the probability that all 16 were is 85% (.99^16). 0.98^16 would be 72%, less than 3 chances in 4!
So perhaps one has no reason to fear visiting, in this case, the Tower of London 😉 , or haunting from distant ancestors? 🙂
—
I’ve often wondered about the name “Unthank”. Not even sure what that means. “I unthank you”?
—
AIUI, Legally your name is whatever you choose, absent fraudulent intent. Use “Ben” on everything, and you’re Ben. The main exception is getting court blessings if you’re in line for an inheritance, that sort of thing where it has to be traceable.
Locally, there’s a woman suspected of the disappearance of her stepson who’s going to court to try to change her name. A previous judge disapproved, as the case is still open.
Unthank is the name of about a dozen places in Britain (see Wikipedia), so I presume the name is a toponym, such as Jack London. Whether it’s un-thank, unt-hank, or unth-ank, I can’t guess. Viking, maybe??
English names commonly migrate from surname to given name, Duncan Hunter vs. Hunter Thompson. Or, if you worked for or had fealty toward Richard, you might be named William Richards, and equally, Richard Williams. But perhaps I’m being obvious.
See: http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Unthank
They say the place-name and then the surname Unthank derive from Old English Unpance, meaning “without leave,” in other words, not allowed, unlawful. They cite the Oxford English Dictionary of Place Names for this.
However, I would bet that is not unpance, but unþance, where a human or an OCR program has misread þ and substituted p. Thus, the old Anglo-Saxon word would’ve been unthance (þ = th, thorn in runes adopted into Anglo-Saxon Latinized alphabet).
The Wiki disambiguation page gives several towns/cities/villages named Unthank, a few people, and a folk music group.
Then I had to look up the etymology for “thanks” and thus found a very neat etymological dictionary online. What a cool resource!
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=thank
I’m bookmarking that handy site and the surnamedb.com site too.
Apparently, thanks derives from thancian, in a sense of thanking, as well as thinking good thoughts of someone. It turns out it’s related by vowel-shift of a past-tense verb form to thincian, to think. So when one thanks someone, originally, one thought well of them or what they’d done.
Language is a wonderful thing. Language change is amazing.
I recall reading an analogy that languae was like a form of upgradeable software for human beings.
Great stuff! — Bren and Py and Hilfy would likely be fascinated.
One of my cousins named her daughter Deja (forgive the lack of diacritics) because she liked the sound of it. Now as Canadians we get at least some French in school but I hadn’t realized how little had stuck in this case. My comment was, “Listen girl, you’re 35! This kid isn’t deja, she’s enfin!” Didn’t hurt the baby any though, she’s currently graduated from high school and gorgeous.
Naming customs in my mother’s family are: you get one name because your parents like it and one name to flatter one of the older generation which might leave a legacy to the baby. They are arranged whichever way is most euphonious and the kid gets called whichever one, or variation, is least confusing. For example right now we seem to have a plentitude of Kathleens. But one is Kay (aunt), another is Kathleen (cousin) and a third is Kate (niece). No problem.
Add in too the issue of adoptions and fostering, so yjat a child may not know his/her biological family and history. O
f course, that may be a blessing, to have a family. But the child often wonders about his/her birth family and who they are, why he/she is different, and why he/she was given for adoption, even when happy in the adopted family.
The family history goes that one of my great-grandfathers never knew his birth family, or didn’t know much. He’d been fostered or adopted, probably orphaned, when he was young.
Odd, I’ve just realized that might be a generation or two removed from the ancestor on that side who’d immigrated to America from England or Scotland, a doctor, so that the great-grandfather would’ve (probably) been adopted into a family who could raise him with benefits.
But that great-grandfather’s son, my mother’s father, was named with an iffy spelling, one I haven’t seen elsewhere in English, and pronounced, typically for the region (rural Texas and Oklahoma, early 20th century) a “non-standard” pronunciation: Lorance, pronounced “Lor-‘RANCE,” instead of like English Laurence or German Lorenz (or French Laurence as “Lohr-Rahnss”). This, despite that the family were townsfolk, middle class, from what I can tell.
My maternal grandmother also has a name that’s problematic for spelling, and went by her middle name too: Aileen. From what I can tell, she adopted that spelling when she had moved again to the city while married. Her parents (and her brothers and sisters) still spelled it Aline, because, hey, they were rural and poor, and spelling was still quite iffy back then (early 20th century). It’s pronounced like Eileen, but with a short A as in cat, instead of the long I as in eye.
My dad’s family tree gets more interesting, with more of a mix of English, Scottish, and very German ancestors, mostly from the same region a generation or two after settling in America. With an instance a few generations back there where two local families were such good friends that siblings from one famiy married siblings from the other, so the first cousins would’ve been very closely tied.
Note: I’ve asked before and got mixed answers, but I’ll ask again. One of those (presumably German, possibly Dutch?) last names is spelled, variously, as Kopenhaver, Copenhaver, and (given the time, 1800’s) that was likely Kopenhauer, Copenhauer, since tradtion at the time ~still~ had formal usage of V for U on monuments (very plain tombstones in a family cemetery, very rural Appalachian Mountains in Virginia). — My family name’s not Kopenhaver (etc.) but they were ancestors in my paternal line.
My last name is highly unusual, either northern English near the Scots border in origin, or else a German dialectal variant. It still gets misspelled and mispronounced very often, even though it’s only one letter (or two) off from two much more common English family names.
My paternal grandmother’s line gets interesting with spellings, but it’s a very common English family name. One person with an unfortunate part in early Colonial history (in white and Indian relations) may have been an ancestor: Lt. Vincent Hobbs (spell Hobbs variously for that time and you’ll still get it right), connected with a bad incident involving men connected to Chief Benge (or Bench), one of the local tragedies of white and Indian relations of the Colonial period and about a generation before the Trail of Tears. My dad’s take on this was that the two men were blood brothers or brothers-in-law, but that Lt. Hobbs and Chief Benge were compelled to fight, because Chief Benge had been declared renegade, outlaw, by the state governor, after men under Chief Benge’s authority, but without his knowledge or approval, had made some raid and taken(?) (that is, supposedly kidnapped or taken hostage) a white woman and white girl. (No, I don’t know if the young ladies liked or opposed it). Whites became stirred up against the Indians, despite prior uneven or good relations. Chief Benge and his people were eventually declared renegade, or eventually forced into it and then declared so. Chief Benge was later killed by Lt. Hobbs, and the veteran lieutenant was “awarded” a rifle (accounts say it was engraved) to be (supposedly) placed above his mantle. (Or at least, that was where it was supposed to go….) However, Hobbes and Benge knew either other, served during the Revolutionary War together, and had been friends and/or famiy and possibly Hobbs had been adopted (by Indian custom) as a blood brother. (I don’t know if there were children from further ties, into my ancestry, but it’s one source of (so far undocumented) stories of “Indian blood” in the family, which is likely enough true. Part of the historical accounts indicate men from very near my dad’s famiy’s farm were involved in one of the posses. Sigh…. (And my dad believed, from what he’d read of this, that Hobbs and Benge had had to fight, Hobbs had had to kill Benge or Benge would’ve had to kill Hobbs, so that my dad believed this was no happy honor for Lt. Hobbs, to have killed a man who had been a friend and/or family and/or a blood brother, adopted into Benge’s famiy by Indian custom. (Indian nation: Cherokee or one of the other connected tribes or another of the Five Civilized Tribes allied to the Cherokee.) So there’s quite a lot to say Lt. Hobbs was an ancestor and a very bad old incident in history, and some clues that there may be Indian ancestry from my paternal grandmother’s line, at least. (The whole story shows just how good and bad relations were between whites and Indians then. My dad’s famiy’s farm had been in the family since the 1820’s or earlier, and clearly, there were Indians in the area too. — My dad had said he didn’t have documented proof of Indian ancestry at the last time he and I had talked about it. I don’t recall if he’d proved if Lt. Hobbs was definitely an ancestor. — But it means one branch of my family (white settlers) may have been involved in something awful, and another possible branch (Indians who were friends and/or family) too, and I’d say both sides were victims of a larger crime against them.
Then on my mother’s side, in at least her father’s line, there’s the possibility or probability of an Indian connection, with a known ancestor a great-great-aunt or great-great-grandmother, who was fully Indian, possibly Cherokee, but certainly an Indian living in Texas, where the photo (which I hope is still surviving) was taken. Her marriage was accepted by both sides of the family. — To top it off, what is (I suppose) an unrelated (or related?) family branch (same last name) were closely tied, supporters and allies, of Cherokee people in Oklahoma. To further add to the mix, my own grandmother’s second-oldest brother’s middle name was also connected as a family name of Cherokee allies, but I don’t know if it was more than coincidence. (Note, her husband was in the possibly-allied line.) My biological grandfather and his family (and my grandmother) knew (of course) about the great-great-aunt or great-great-grandmother, but as often happens, at least some fo the information documenting that, collected by one great-aunt and my mother, was gotten rid of by someone else’s mistake when my mom passed away.
So…it’s possible I have Cherokee (or allied) Indian ancestry on both my maternal and paternal lines, but no way, as yet, to prove it. — Personal project: to find where that photo went to, along with a portion of other records.
Also note: In any case, the ancestry is too far back to say I’m officially Cherokee, or any other native Indian nation, if I can prove either connection. It’s necessary to prove at least 1/8 ancestry for it to count officially, for the Cherokee.
But…interesting stories, and it adds to the overall history, families and national.
Or parents or grandparents dying young. My grandfather’s mother died when he was three, so he and his three sisters were raised by other family members – he was raised by his mother’s parents. His paternal grandfather died during the Civil War (shot by Confederate raiders) and was one of two sons. His paternal grandfather was also one of two sons, and moved to Virginia from Pennsylvania, so away from most of the family, although they were literate and his sons did write to each other (ten sons, one daughter; I’ve been able to track the daughter and two of the other sons, mostly by luck). So it’s not surprising that most of what was passed along was not so much ‘wrong’ as ‘not quite right’.
One thing I found, when looking at baptisms on the way-back two-son generation, was that ‘Evans’ was pronounced with a long E. The baptisms were done by a German minister, who spelled ‘Evan’ using German phonetics, as ‘Ivan’. They may have pronounced it that way in the 19th century too, as I found a cousin recorded as ‘Evens’.
One should always know one’s biological family for medical reasons. Our culture should accomodate that. Psychological issues aside, the biology of genetics may make it important. IMO, we’ve allowed the “mind-body split” to become too wide, but of course as an Aspie I’m rather aware that’s a “crock”. 😉
If you look at your own genetics, you get half from each parent, a quarter of which is from each grandparent, an eighth of which is from each great-grandparent, and a 16th, 32nd, 64th and 128th of which is from 2nd through fifth-greats. So by the time you hit sixth and seventh (at 1/296th) and eighth 1/592nd…this is why an autosomal DNA test doesn’t go deeper than the 7th generation, since it relies on cohesive strings of DNA, as I understand it, and by that time you’ve gotten increasingly diced up.
However there are certain keys that pop up beyond that. There are DNA bits that are comparatively rare, especially in certain regions. There are also the sets of DNA we get unbroken from parent to parent to parent: the MTDNA (which is the power-unit of every cell) comes down the direct maternal line to ALL children of a given woman. ONLY the females can pass it on (because it is the tail of the sperm, which falls off at fertilization—so the egg of a female rejects this bit as superfluous: she already has one, thank you.) Because ALL offspring of a woman get the same, it will be identical in mother, grandchildren—AND in brothers and sisters, and in nieces but not nephews—and in female cousins but not male—and so on, because it comes to EVERY child of a given woman, and is pretty well unchanged for many thousands of years.
Male Y-DNA is similar, but it comes ONLY to sons; so a guy’s brother, but not his sisters; his nephews, but not his nieces; his male cousins etc—all have an identical pattern, going back thousands of years unchanged.
Both these are fairly complex codes in themselves, and while the TYPE is unchanged for thousands of years, there is information within the code that is much more specific.
So I share an H5b code that is fairly uncommon in the first place, and mostly centered in the Balkans and Asia Minor, Greece and southern Italy some 5000 years ago–I share that with likely hundreds of thousands if not millions of other women—and I specifically trace my near-exact copy to a Jony Scholes in Bury, Lancashire, ca 1560…and before that to a woman simply known as Ellenor, her mother—because churches didn’t think women had names after they were married, one of the most vexing injustices going. The only tree-connection to that region is a lady from Italy, who married into one family—Did her MTDNA win the cosmic lottery, among all those thousands? We do not find Ms. Scholes’ line connecting to that family, because we don’t have that line continued. So probably not: she was a respectable wife but nobody of historic note, lived and died quietly in Bury, having birthed a set of children who would beget children headed for America, where, having married up with Jane’s family, they would set up one of the earliest universities in the Americas…Harvard. This of course would not buy Jane or myself a cup of coffee in the student lounge, but it is one thing we have in common.
My brother traces his Y-DNA to a John Cherrie from Northamptonshire, ca 1448…and possibly to Cher in central France, via Jean de Chery in 1390…but that Y-DNA is not common in England, which is mostly R. It’s an M-200-something, and via its class and type traces not to France or England, or the Mediterranean, but, about 5000 years ago, to the Caucasus Mountains, which begin around Sochi, where the Olympic Games were held: the charting of that line as emanating from the Germanic Franks may not be bogus.
So my parents had to meet at an icehouse in Oklahoma, introduced by the nephew of the outlaw Cole Younger, who rode with the James boys.
That’s just at birth–after that “epigenetics” plays an ever increasing role. I can always tell the Keno brothers apart.
The “dicing” you mention is from “crossing over”. But there are also “inversions”, and cross-overs are suppressed at the chiasmas. Errrm, you probably didn’t need to know that, did you? “It’s complicated.”
mt-DNA doesn’t have any connection to the sperm cell – it’s in the mitochondria, which are in the egg, but not in the nucleus (where the rest of the DNA is). That’s why it’s the female-line marker: you can’t get it from your father.
The tail of the sperm is there just to make it move.
It is the tail, which moves it, then falls off at the moment the sperm enters the egg—perhaps the eggshell has some defense against foreign MTDNA. I’ll like to know what happens in in-vitro.
Sorry – iI had to learn about mitochondria in biology. Also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_DNA which says that yes, sperm tails have mitochondria – they have to, mitochondria do energy things for cells – but the tails fall off and anything in them is destroyed. So it’s the mitochondria in the egg that gets passed down, which is why it’s a female-line marker.
I am snickering this afternoon, because the discussion of where the non-paternity event(s) happened brought up the possibility that John of Gaunt’s son John Beaufort may not have been his son at all: Catherine Roet was married to Hugh Swinford at the time, so Beaufort could be an actual Swinford, and not a Plantagenet. It’s quite possible that neither York nor Lancaster were male-line descendants of Edward III – but York was claiming through the female line. (It only affects Henry VII’s claim.)
GOtta love it. I’m related to John of Gaunt, so I’m following this with a smile as well.
I figure the occasional horsegroom kept infusing vitality into the genepool…
Yep. It’s getting interesting.
The latest theory on Richard’s ancestors: the Beauforts are actually descendants of Hugh Swinford, Catherine Roet’s husband at the time John Beaufort was born. This would include the Tudors….
So what now, disinterring bodies to take bone samples?
One of the really interesting points about European nobles and royalty: their gene pool was so small that they continually doubled back on certain lines—over, and over, and over. It’d be a real good study for a space colony.
If you have one link to one of the ‘great families’ you will find your tree developing convolute and tangled branches.
And if there is anybody in European nobility that Richard was NOT related to, that would be the wonder. John of Gaunt’s line is frequently questioned, and that one is tied into practically everybody. An obscure Islamic princess—I think she was Turkish—got into the Bavarian royal line, and thence that relationship put her in every royal line in Europe.
Apropos marital relationships: My something-th GGF was Mstislav I of Kiev (Wikipedia link). His mother was Gytha of Wesex (click on the “show” in Ancestry), daughter of Harold Godwinson, aka Harold II, last Anglo-Saxon King of England, (died 1066 😉 ). Who’d’ve expected going that far for a marriage?
Philippa of Hainault (24 June 1314 – 15 August 1369) was Queen of England as the wife of King Edward III. Her matrilineal line (again click Ancestry “show”) goes through Elizabeth “the Cuman”. The Cuman were originally Mongols from the great bend of the Yellow River. So the Windsors have “The Golden Horde” in their tree! Woo-hoo! 😉
At this point, I might not mind, if the horsegroom is nice and friendly.
I don’t know if I am really any more or less choosy than earlier in life. Just wishing, I guess, as I don’t expect to run into Mr. Right (or vice versa) any time soon…only, I’m approaching 49. If only I had been (much) less uptight and better at self-acceptance earlier; but I wasn’t; or friends who were more…something-or-other about it. Problem: I don’t know what it would have taken, at around college age, to reach me.
So yeah, that horsegroom? Sure hope he’s not too bothered by “complicated mess” or perhaps “no longer a young kid.”
Is it a problem that i have no horses, just a couple of goofy, opinionated cats? Heh.