Mixed news

Feb 15, 2020 | Family Tree

I had two bit of news yesterday that cancelled each other out.

The first was that an old friend of mine from my late teens and early twenties has died. He was a year younger than me. I’m not naming him because I don’t yet have clearance from his family and don’t want his name to show up on a search. I hadn’t seen him for several years, but there was a time when we were very close.

It knocked the wind out of my sails on what might otherwise have been a fun day. A chance breakthough on the family tree research appears to show two separate lines of descent from William the Conqueror and his sister to my Mum. Now, there are an awful lot of contingencies in that, not least faulty research and all the things I mentioned in my post yesterday. Also, it is pretty much a nailed-on certainty that those of us with largely British descent, and also European descent, are all descended in one way or another from William. It’s nice to see it written down, though, even if there are substantial caveats.

If true, then I probably also share common ancestry with the Presidents Bush. More interestingly (sorry George), it pushes my family tree research, previously stuck at 1746, back into the first millenium CE via identifiable people. I’d like to make similar breakthroughs on my other lines.

I also have to say that, after the first rush of discovery, it is still all just names on paper and my interest, wherever possible, is in the people, how they lived, and the society they lived in, not just their names and dates.