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Read What's Your Family Story? Leaving AARP. Got it! Before then, England included seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Alfred the Great, who was King of Wessex, negotiated a treaty in that extended his rule to areas of West Mercia and Kent. Despite the title, Alfred the Great never ruled the eastern and northern regions of modern England. He is often regarded as the first true king of England. Starting in , England and Scotland were ruled in a personal union under the Scottish House of Stuart.
The two countries were legally merged in , forming the Kingdom of Great Britain. Since then, 12 monarchs have ruled Great Britain. The very fact that this account exists—probably the first biography of a European ruler—is testament to how important he was or at least was seen to be. He was the son of Pippin the Short, an aggressive ruler of France who expanded the Frankish kingdom until his death during the return journey from a campaign against the persistently rebellious realm of Aquitaine in Charlemagne stepped up as his successor, and continued the expansion with aplomb.
A fecund ruler, Charlemagne sired at least 18 children by motley wives and concubines, including nine by his second wife, Hildegard of Vinzgau. These kin included Charles the Younger, Pippin the Hunchback, Drogo of Metz, Hruodrud, Ruodhaid, Adalheid, Hludowic, and not forgetting Hugh, and he consolidated his reign by installing many of his sons in positions of power across the expanding empire.
We can trace a path directly from his fruitful loin: It begins with his son Louis the Pious, via Lothar, Bertha, Willa, Rosele, eight men called Baldwin, and so on through the ages until it reaches the 21st century in a Dutch family called the Backer-Dirks, whose family tree all the way back to the king is publicly available online.
This pedigree, by gorgeous chance, also contains Joachim Neumann, a 17th-century German Protestant preacher, who sought peace and meditation away from the political machinations and church hullabaloo of Dusseldorf in a small cave near the river Dussel. He had changed his name from Neumann to a Greek version with the same meaning: new man.
This was the location of the very first new human to be identified, a century later, in the valley of Joachim Neander—Neanderthal man. Sometime at the end of the 13th century lived a man or woman from whom all Europeans could trace ancestry.
What a lineage to behold! It comes as no great surprise that in the world of amateur genealogy, being descended from imperial royalty is considered of high cachet. In fact, descent from anyone actually named from history brings prestige, as the vast majority of humans have drifted into and out of existence leaving little or no historical footprint that shows they ever drew breath.
To be drawn from the bloodline of a king, and not just any old Holy Roman Emperor, but the very first, must be momentous. The Carandini family is one of the oldest in Europe and traces itself back to the first century A.
It is believed to have been connected with the Emperor Charlemagne, and as such was granted the right to bear the coat of arms of the Holy Roman Empire by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. M aybe it was to enhance his august yet sinister screen image as having played some of the wickedest characters in film history. Hail to the king!
We are all special, which also means that none of us is. This is merely a numbers game. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. Each generation back the number of ancestors you have doubles. But this ancestral expansion is not borne back ceaselessly into the past.
If it were, your family tree when Charlemagne was Le Grand Fromage would harbor around ,,, individuals on it—more people than were alive then, now, or in total. What this means is that pedigrees begin to fold in on themselves a few generations back, and become less arboreal, and more a mesh or weblike. You can be, and in fact are, descended from the same individual many times over. Your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother might hold that position in your family tree twice, or many times, as her lines of descent branch out from her, but collapse onto you.
People are increasingly turning to DNA for family links. And Ms Churchill found her own unexpected history. But it wasn't about being related to a medieval king. I had no inkling," she says. Personally I wasn't, but it did make me start thinking about identity. Ms Churchill, whose parents are no longer alive, says it made her realise that she hadn't lost any sense of identity by finding out this lack of a genetic connection to her father or the ancestors she had researched for so long.
It didn't change her sense of family relationships, and it also didn't dampen her enthusiasm for the detective work of genealogy. He's interesting historically, but he's not really me.
Image source, PA Media. Josh Widdicombe found he was related to Edward I. But genealogists say it's much more likely than people expect.
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