FAQ

I would like to put an FAQ here, but since I am very rarely asked questions about my family history, it is bit of a misleading title. I should probably really call it Answers to Questions I Am Pretending to Ask Myself.

Where did you get the title?

It sucks, doesn’t it? It was the first title that Google sites told me was not already being used, after about 600 tries. It comes from Ecclesiasticus 44:1:

Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.

Really, though, it has stuck in my head from when I read as a teenager James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I suppose it is somewhat appropriate as a title (except that I am not really praising anyone and the tree is almost half mothers), but I am definitely open to changing the name if I can come up with a better one that isn’t being used.

Why did you put this together?

I am not sure. It is no easier to explain, I think, than why some people like to do jigsaw puzzles or crossword puzzles. A family tree has the pull of these, plus the appeal to my vanity that one of the pieces of the puzzle is me.

Doesn’t researching your family history give you insight into who you are?

No, it does not. First of all, if I want to know who I am, introspection is pretty effective. But even if, for some reason, I had lost access to that, family history wouldn’t help much. We are who we are largely because of the history of our interactions with the world we have lived in. That world, for me, has of course included my immediate family, but also friends, school, books, TV, the internet, and so on. Any influence of ancestors even a few generations back on my world has been, at best, very weak and indirect. If you want to learn about the influence of the past on the present, you are better off studying history in a more general way.

But don’t your genes also count?

I suppose. I am not a biologist, but I suspect most people (and most evolutionary psychologists) grossly overestimate the importance of genes on personality. But even if I am wrong, consider this: you have 2^1 parents, 2^2 grandparents, 2^3 great-grandparents, 2^4 great-great-grandparents, and so on. You have fewer than 2^15 individual genes. So an ancestor more than 15 generations back has likely passed on no genes to you at all. Actually, you don’t even have to go back 15 generations for this to be true, since DNA is generally passed on in chunks. According to this page, 9 generations is all it takes. (OK, I am ignoring Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA).

So you haven’t learned anything from doing this?

I have learned a lot of odds and ends. I have learned that one’s attested ancestors tend to be richer the farther back you go, partly due to a bias in the survival of records and partly due to a bias in the survival of children.

Why are there so many medieval people on the site?

After about 10 years of poking around, I managed to come across a well-documented line back to Edward I. You would not believe how many known ancestors people in that circle have.

How do you know that X is really the son of Y?

As Bob Dylan said, “There are no truths outside the Garden of Eden.” Maybe advances in genetic genealogy will eventually make a difference, but for now, in the best case, I can really only say “X was considered to be the son of Y, and very probably actually was.” That’s enough for me. I regard undetected adultery in a family tree as no big deal. (If I am not mistaken, I share this attitude with Matthew). More serious would be mistaken identity due to my misinterpretation of evidence. I do my best to avoid this, and think I have been relatively conservative in accepting relationships as “proven”, but I admit I am only human.

But do you even have the skills to interpret the evidence from the medieval period?

Not really. I am not a complete idiot, and my linguistic skills in the relevant languages are not terrible, but generally what I do when I get into an unfamiliar era or place is to try and find well-regarded secondary sources and follow their lead. Of course, even doing this can be tricky: sometimes the better sources are not easy to get, and my opinion of the reliability of various secondary sources has evolved as I have been using them. I could have simply looked at the footnotes of the secondary sources and cited the original sources they used, but this might imply that I have sifted through the original evidence, interpreted it where necessary, and made judgements about its reliability. I may eventually get there, but in most cases in the medieval period I have not done this. Sometimes, though, I do give original sources in addition to the secondary sources where I (usually) found them. I try to avoid using a single source for an entire page, especially if it is a secondary source that I do not wholly trust.

OK. Here is a little more background to the site that I don’t feel like putting into the form of an answer to a question:

I am only putting up pages for direct ancestors (and not even all of those). I am interested in other connections, but life is short. (I have put some work into Werelate.org, where lateral connections are more of an emphasis. Werelate is a publicly edited wiki, so the work there can be quite uneven.)

I try to give a source for each asserted relationship (except for children, which I may eventually get to), and places and dates of births and deaths. I have generally not bothered to give sources for occupations or titles, and have not made any effort to avoid slight anachronisms with them (e.g., I might say X married Y, earl of Z, when Y did not become earl of Z until after the marriage.)

I have toyed with the idea of giving short biographies on each page, but have abandoned that effort for now.

Like all family history, this is a work in progress and will change as I come across new information. There are many ancestors which have been claimed for people on this site which I have not included because I am uncertain about the reliability of the sources. This is especially true for late medieval and early modern Welsh genealogies, which often give the ancestry of wives of figures who appear more than a couple of centuries back in the pedigrees. Some of these lines are no doubt actually true, but I don't have the expertise to separate those from fabrications. While I have excluded a fair number of these lines, I would not be surprised to find myself forced in the future to remove some that I have included.

And finally, a general warning to anyone considering using this site as a “source”: this is my personal family tree, which I have put together out of curiosity in my free time. While I hope it is worth something, it should not be mistaken for a serious work of scholarship.

Roderick Ward