Am I of (proveable) royal descent?

[jim1]

Descendant of Royalty won't get you a better pension but will get you a better pedigree.

[LizzieW]

The Nineteenth, it is possible that you are of royal descent.

One of my lines leads back to Royalty - a royal female who married one of my ancestors, so their children were not royal - and there are other lines who came over with William the Conqueror but were not related to him.  The reason I know this is because prior to 1837, the families lived in small villages and the parish records are very good with lots of info re BMDs, also I've visited the villages and the churches and looked at the parish records.  As I researched further back, I found my ancestors were married to knights, or sons of knights and at this point, you only have to look in Burke's Peerage to follow the lines back through the centuries. 

This was the tree of my g.grandmother - pity her family was so poor that her father and 2 brothers lived in the workhouse at one point (the girls in the family stayed home with mum) and her grandfather (my 3 x g.grandfather went to live in the workhouse when his daughters died and his son in laws didn't want him any more.  He died in the workhouse).  This was down to generations of being descended from the first son of the first son, only then to become descended from one of the younger sons who wasn't bequeathed a manor house and/or money and titles.

Only a couple of generations previously the family were merchants, then a few more generations back to mid 1500s, they were Lords of the Manor and so on back to the Knights, one who died on the way back from the Crusades, and eventually back to a someone who accompanied William the Conqueror in 1066, who appears to have been a butler but was knighted and given the title of Lord when William the Conqueror was crowned at Westminster.  Interestingly the royal lady who married into my family married again - I assume somehow she got divorced, because she and her first husband died within a couple of years of each other in their 60s, but she had a daughter with her 2nd husband  and two of her grandchildren, offspring of children of both her marriages, ended up marrying each other, my family tree calculator suggests they were half first cousins.

[KGarrad]

I agree, Dawn!

And lineage is only "provable" if you have documentary evidence for every generation.
That means birth certificates, marriage certificates, baptism records, marriage records, wills and so on.

Even Burkes's Peerage is known to be inaccurate; and don't even mention Ancestry Trees!

[LizzieW]

Even Burkes's Peerage is known to be inaccurate

In which case, I guess I need the BBC (WDYTYA) to visit the present day descendants of the original Knights, who are still living in various castles around the UK to verify my research.   

[jim1]

Unlike Ancestry trees the pedigrees of the nobility & Royalty have come from many sources.
Historians for centuries have researched families, dynasties & periods in time so there is a lot of cross-referencing that can be done.
Like LizzieW I too have castles in my family. One now a theme park.

[ThrelfallYorky]

You know, when you think how much hassle people go through, trying to "prove" royal - or even noble - descent, it makes me ever so glad that there simply is NOT anything higher than the odd (very odd, I suspect) "Yeoman Farmer" anywhere, no matter how far back I manage to trundle along the family lines - eeeh, I am common, me!

[jim1]

It's not the Royal & Noble families that cause the hassle as they have been extensively researched.
It's what happened to GGGrandad & who were his parents that causes the hassle.

[clairec666]

Can we ever really prove anything? We only know that x and y are the parents of z because the parish registers say so. We've all seen relatives telling porkies in official records... I've often wondered how many of the mariner's wives in my tree played away while their husband was at sea... maybe complete sections of my tree are wrong!

Anyway, sorry to be cynical

TheNineteenth - what do you know about your ancestor Frances Robinson born 1810? You don't specify where in Essex she's from, so can you be sure you've found the correct parents for her? This is the only weak link as far as I can see - your research looks pretty sound but I haven't tested it too rigorously.

[coombs]

You just have to use the 99.9% certainty and always accept the 0.01% uncertainty about the bloodlines in our family tree.

I am more worried about tracing earliest known ancestors on lines to see if I can get back further, rather than try and prove a link to royalty.