If you go back far enough, everyone is related to someone important.

On my father’s side, as I mentioned in the last post, we appear to trace back (via a farm labourer getting a descendant of nobility pregnant out of wedlock) to Robert the Bruce and William Wallace, plus other Scottish and Pictish rulers.

On my mother’s side, we have some fancy ancestors too, if you go back far enough. Attila the Hun, for example, whose ancestry supposedly traces back to Prince Damah of the Huns, born 750 BC. Yes, I was amazed; of course, genealogies that far back are super unreliable, but it’s remarkable that they exist at all. Though Wikipedia remarks: “valid genealogical sources are rare, and there seems to be no verifiable way to trace Attila’s descendants beyond a few generations. This has not stopped many genealogists from attempting to reconstruct a valid line of descent to various medieval rulers.”

On that same side are such people as Amblicus of Apameae in Syria; his descendant Tetratius Proconsul of Treves; Julius Caesar; various kings of the Franks, Lombards and Thuringians; Karl Martel, winner of the Battle of Tours in 732 and grandfather of Charlemagne, who’s also an ancestor via the Scottish side; Bertrade, Princess of Norway; Rollo, Count of Rouen and first Duke of Normandy (an ancestor of William the Conqueror, who, again, is an ancestor on the Scottish side); the literally colourfully named Rhun of the Red Spear; his alleged ancestors Macsen Wledig, also known as Maximus, Western Roman Emperor and the legendary Lludd of the Silver Hand, King of Siluria and of the Tuatha de Danann, who (according to legend) rebuilt London and is the supposed namesake of Ludgate, and whose ancestry is traced back to Aeneas of Latium in 1120 BC and then to the Trojans; Saxon kings like Wiglaf of Mercia; Sir Hugh Bigod, 3rd Earl of Norfolk, one of the sureties of Magna Carta; the gang, you might say, are all here.

They gradually funnel down through Cornish nobility and gentry to the Blewetts, one of whom eventually had a daughter who married a miner named Polglase and emigrated first to Australia sometime between 1847 and 1853, then to New Zealand by 1857 (I’m going off the birthplaces of their children here). By the time her granddaughter Mary Ellen Newport married my great-grandfather “Alfie” Gardner, the son of a bootmaker, who was proud to have been born within the sound of Bow bells (the traditional definition of a Cockney), and who emigrated as a child in the 1870s, the family had come down in the world considerably from the Roman emperors, proconsuls, kings, princesses, dukes, earls and Norman knights.

Mind you, over a period of three thousand years, any family is going to have its ups and downs, right? The daughters of royalty marry nobility, the daughters of nobility marry gentry, the daughters of gentry marry substantial farmers and tradesmen, their daughters marry less successful farmers and tradesmen, their daughters marry labourers. And yes, sometimes they marry up instead, but the whole thing is shaped like a pyramid, meaning there just aren’t as many people to marry at the pointy bit as there are at the base; the average trend is always going to be downwards over the long term. Also, of course everyone (including today’s royal and noble houses) had many commoner ancestors in the same early times. They just have no documentation.

On the other side of the family tree, my father’s side, I found another Cornish family named Bowden (the Cornish seemed to have intermarried with everyone, maybe because of the place’s geographical position, maybe because people came to trade for tin from early times). This one links me back ultimately to Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, via a lot of high-status Jewish people, one of whom married Nebuchadnezzar’s daughter. If you can believe records that far back, which you almost certainly can’t.

Out of curiosity, I tried finding my closest common relative with Queen Elizabeth II. It actually came out on my wife’s side. She is the late queen’s ninth cousin twice removed, via a fellow named Colonel Augustine Warner Jr in the 17th century; one of his daughters is my wife’s ancestor, and another is Queen Elizabeth’s (through her mother).

Now the disclaimers, and they are several and large. Firstly, this data is all coming from familysearch, which is run by the LDS Church largely so that people can be baptised for their ancestors, and so there’s a perverse incentive to find a noble ancestor (who will give you a much larger number of ancestors, since better records were kept of the nobility), even if you have to be a bit generous with your assumptions about which specific one of several people with the same name is your ancestor. I haven’t checked every link in this enormous chain, obviously. I’ve noticed that when I try to trace my less distinguished ancestors, I either get lost in generations of men with the same names as their fathers (almost always only one forename, and that usually a common one), or the records just give out, usually sometime in the 18th century. If you don’t hit someone with a long pedigree in a relatively small number of generations, you’re out of luck.

Secondly, the lines of descent further back are inherently unreliable, by the nature of medieval approaches to factuality and the tendency of powerful people (or people in general) to inflate their resumes. Wikipedia warns: “In European genealogy, a descent from antiquity (DFA or DfA) is a proven unbroken line of descent between specific individuals from ancient history and people living today. Ancestry can readily be traced back to the Early Middle Ages, but beyond that, tracing to historical figures from antiquity is impractical due to insufficient documentation of the ancestry of the predominantly new royal and noble families of the period. Though the subject of ongoing effort, no well-researched, historically-documented generation-by-generation genealogical descents are known to exist in Europe… No European DFA is accepted as established.”

Finally, if you go back far enough, everyone is related to everyone anyway. I mentioned in a post on my writing blog a while back the theory of statistician Joseph Chang, which is that anyone who lived long enough ago and is the ancestor of anyone is eventually the ancestor of everyone. Of course I’m descended from Julius Caesar, Charlemagne and Attila the Hun; so is everyone else whose ancestry traces back to Western Europe, assuming that those men have any living descendants at all.

It’s just fun to see it laid out on a tree, that’s all. Even if a lot of it is probably fictional.