RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => Topic started by: Quarryman on Saturday 13 August 22 10:28 BST (UK)
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An ongoing puzzle for me - how come so many 'celebrities' appearing on television ancestry programmes are told they are related to royalty/aristocracy and have their ancestry traced back centuries even into the 'dark ages'. I have so fare been unable to trace my common ancestry back further than the 1600s. Records beyond that are impossible to find, if they even exist.
Just asking.
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I think a disproportionate number of celebrities come from well connected backgrounds, so they are more likely to have a so called 'gateway' ancestor in their tree. Someone who was significantly important enough to have their own family tree documented back in the day.
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One problem is we don't know how many celebs have had their tree researched and just ordinary working class folks back to the 18th century found then like most of us hit a brick wall.
I know Michael Parkinson is much quoted but my guess is they are many more we don't know about.
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As Stanwix points out once you find a gateway ancestor it becomes quite straightforward to get back much earlier.
Another reason is that the sample is a selected one. That is, many more people will have had their trees investigated and those without an interesting story (from the point of view of making a television programme) will have been discarded.
Brie
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I agree with the other comments, however I don’t think there are that many who they find have links to the aristocracy.
What I think the programme makers are usually chasing is just some kind of interesting back story, or to prove that a celebrities specific talent is passed down from a (possibly tenuous) link to ancestors who had a similar talent or interest. Eg musical, acting etc.
Any links to royalty or landed gentry are often recorded and some survive, which is why it is sometimes possible to get back further on those lines than with common folk.
Highly edited, highly contrived but a good watch nonetheless.
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Thanks guys, but I'm still sceptical on these claims
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I think "Royal Connections" is a far better way of putting it, rather than "Gateway Ancestor". I have a connection to all the aristocracy and crowned heads of Europe, but none of them are my ancestor.
My uncle married a Carrapiet;
10 generations back, a male Carrapiet married the youngest daughter of the Stewarts of Shambellie;
the Stewarts of Shambellie were a cadet branch (2nd or 3rd son) of the Royal Stewarts;
and from there to all the royal heads.
A nice connection but no ancestor.
Regards
Chas
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A voice of reason.
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An ongoing puzzle for me - how come so many 'celebrities' appearing on television ancestry programmes are told they are related to royalty/aristocracy and have their ancestry traced back centuries even into the 'dark ages'. I have so fare been unable to trace my common ancestry back further than the 1600s. Records beyond that are impossible to find, if they even exist.
TV programmes have access to paid researchers, specialists and archives which may not be available to ordinary folk.
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I don't trust these programmes to be totally accurate after a distant relative of mine (my gt-gt-grandmother's step-sister) was found to be the ancestor of a certain athlete. I was contacted by a BBC researcher looking for information about the athlete's family history and was able to point her in the direction of quite a few useful bits of verified information. Disappointingly when the programme went out the most interesting ancestor was confused with another of the same name in a different generation and the mistake was also repeated in the Radio Times blurb. I wrote to express my displeasure, but never got a reply, of course.
The researcher had traced me through my RootsChat conversations! :)
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You are probably right.
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Gillg, do you think the athlete could have been related to the other person of the same name rather than your ancestor? :-\
It seems odd that they would dismiss the correct information supplied by you, and opt for going with the wrong person instead. Surely there would not be any point in doing that. :-\
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TV programmes have access to paid researchers, specialists and archives which may not be available to ordinary folk.
And still get things wrong at times ::)
Annie
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There was much publicity recently when the comedian Josh Widdecombe discovered that he is related to Henry VIII. Of course the TV Program failed to mention the number of his known and unknown relatives who are also related to Henry VIII.
I myself have a gateway ancestor, a Protestant Cleric who was imprisoned in the Tower of London during the reign of Mary I of England in 1553.
There are about 20 DNA matches with the Cleric plus all the living relatives who have not taken a DNA Test.
Tony
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Gillg, do you think the athlete could have been related to the other person of the same name rather than your ancestor? :-\
It seems odd that they would dismiss the correct information supplied by you, and opt for going with the wrong person instead. Surely there would not be any point in doing that. :-\
It seems careless to me! I'm not the only researcher following this family line and we are all quite certain that this mistake was made. The programme confused mother and younger relative with the same name and married the older one to the younger one's husband. The mother was a very interesting character - she had several children with different fathers and ran a pub of a rather dubious nature.
Getting back to the topic, I'm afraid I don't seem to have any royal connections, though maybe some Viking nobleman or Scottish clan chieftain seems a possible scenario, given the geographical location of most of one side of the family (though not the same side as the naughty landlady)!
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I managed to get one line back to a farmer and bought a couple of family Wills (can't recall the dates but about the 1700s). The marriage and baptisms he was noted as a "butcher" but the wills shows he had land and also rented other fields for raising his own animals. If somebody had land - in those days it meant a large landowner had given a portion of his land to his offspring - eventually with the passage of time there would only be a small acreage of land left that could not be divided.
my ancestor's name was "Dodson" = son of Doda.
https://opendomesday.org/name/alwin-dodson/
Have a look on the site and see if any of your names are listed:-
http://www.domesdaybook.co.uk/
I got further back by following the female Dodson line further back until I got to a female with the surname Welles. The first male with that placename surname was given the land (where he built Welles Cathedral) by his father (a Baron in the 1100s) who ruled Lincolnshire county, which at that time covered all of the land from the River Humber down to London. I recall school history lessons when our teacher said the first barons got so powerful that one King divided the land so that the Barons power and their armies weren't as large as the king's. I haven't bothered to follow the line on the European mainland
there is only one thing in that line that intrigues me and that was an item in one of the wills, which has mention of "a Lyon Horse" - was that a type of horse or did he buy a horse from Queen Elizabeth's maternal ancestors = Bowes Lyon? :o
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On a visit to our local Archives a few years ago my Wife asked a member of the staff if they had any records on a family who own a Hall in a nearby hamlet.
We went into an organised presentation and a tour of the Records Store and when we got back there on a desk with a Reserved sign on it was a stack of documents including a family tree going back to the 1100’s.
In the tree we found my Wife’s 4xGreat Grandfather married to one of the daughters of the family that owned the Hall.
An hour after seeing the surname Stanley in the tree I had gone back to King Edward III, it then took us a few days to validate my findings.
So yes it can happen and it did for me when I traced my lineage back to the family who owned a Castle in Cumbria. So once you have a Gateway it opens up the floodgates and to me Gateway is the best way if describing the find. Its nit the Royal Connection, its finding out about the intrigue, death, manipulation and persecution that took place to various individuals in our trees.
It is all well and good having Royal Connections but we all do, its a case of being lucky to find them.
Me, finding a xGreat Uncle who was tried and sentenced to death, not once but twice and then imprisoned on a Hulk before being sent to Oz where he gained his freedom eventually, this was a far more an exciting find.
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”It is all well and good having Royal Connections but we all do, its a case of being lucky to find them.”
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head Biggles.
I’ve got a missing link, who, if I could find his baptism and father’s (or parent’s names) would lead to royalty. Many of us have come to a stop at the same place, including a distant relative who did his research almost a century ago. Some researchers have the same family lines going back to the C10th and beyond. It was written into a book in the 1930s, included the work done by aforementioned distant relative, and is currently being put online. I haven’t included any of this on my tree, and I don’t have the skill or means to follow it up to check for accuracy. I’m a bit of a doubting Thomas.
I suppose if I were on WDYTYA and a team of researchers had found this same family history, they may be tempted to present it to me as fact. :)