Earliest Known Ancestor

How to ace a job interview.

My dusty old resume lists “genealogy” as an “interest.” That was, perhaps, a minor understatement.

When I first started my working career, my interests were way down at the bottom of the resume. But they were prominently displayed nonetheless, because what else did I have to talk about? The eighth grade science fair? Now “Interests” does not make an appearance until the much-maligned page 2. Last time I changed jobs, no one mentioned it. But back in the beginning, an era growingly increasing distant in my rearview mirror, interviewers would gamely try to engage me on the subject.

It was always the same question. Genealogy. Huh. Like your family tree?

How far back can you go?

Seems a simple enough question—if you’re not a genealogist. But its a very difficult question to answer with accuracy. You’ve only got a few sentences before your questioner loses interest. You don’t want to lie at a job interview, but you also don’t want to sound like a weirdo. If you try to keep it short, your interviewer will leave with a thousand little misimpressions about you, about genealogy, about human history. Such a monumental responsibility!

The short—truthful!—answer, my friends, is that I can go as far back as the 6th century, A.D.¹ That’s what I’d say when they asked. Then they’d say “wow,” either enthusiastically or skeptically, and I’d rush to explain that we all have a shocking number of ancestors and 99% of the branches on my family tree are cut off long before then and really anyone can trace their family back that far if they just happen to tap into the right well-recorded skein of lower nobility and in the end, aren’t we all descended from Charlemagne and/or Confucius and/or Genghis Khan, and/or the Prophet Mohammed?

And now, please allow me to explain in full, as I never could in a twenty minute job interview.

How Far Back Can You Go?

What a great question!

First of all, my ancestry is entirely western European. Within western Europe, it’s mostly from nations and populations that kept individual-level records throughout the modern era. And not only that, its mostly from places that didn’t lose their records in a catastrophic fire. One big exception there (I’m looking at you, Ireland).

Every population or ethnic group comes with its own set of genealogical rules and its own natural end point. For most of Protestant and Catholic western Europe, the rule is that, on average, you can trace your family, no matter how poor, back to the seventeenth century. That’s a solid four hundred years, enough to keep any genealogist busy for a lifetime.²

I said on average. And I used italics, so you can’t say I didn’t warn you. Some lines, even in record-rich Western Europe, will pull up short long before the 1600s. For instance, one of the Italian villages my ancestors called home has been flattened by an earthquake about once every two hundred years. One of those earthquakes took out the cathedral and with it every record predating 1700. Some of my Dutch ancestors lived a little too close to the ocean, and not only are their records a bit squelchy, but their whole village has gone the way of Atlantis.

Then there’s your everyday wear and tear. The priest spills communion wine all over the churchbook. The village prankster feeds it to his goats. I’ve seen one fifty-year period eaten by rats. Pages rip, for Pete’s sake! When you think about all that can happen to a humble parish register, it’s a wonder any have survived.

I digress. Some lines will end early, is my point. But others will keep creeping backward, right back to the 16th century. If your ancestors were Catholic, you can thank the Council of Trent, which in its later years mandated the recording of the sacraments, a regular census of the parish, and the keeping of duplicate churchbooks at the bishop’s office. I mean, what more can you ask for? A lock of hair?

The Church of England mandated its own record-keeping even earlier, in 1538. In other Protestant communities you’ve just got to hope for the best. But it’s usually a fair bet that where one village has both a Catholic and Lutheran church, the Catholic records are going to start first.

Wow, thanks for the brief but learned disquisition on European record-keeping and the very roundabout way of answering my question. So you can go back to 1538? Gee!

Yes, in a few lines—primarily English—I can go back to 1538 or thereabouts. Nothing extraordinary about that, though in olden times it would have required a ton of legwork. Nowadays, say you’re an American with a little bit of colonial New England ancestry. Put your grandmother’s name into Ancestry.com, piggy-back on the research of a second cousin, and you’ve almost instantaneously got a line back to one of the four White siblings who immigrated to colonial Connecticut in the 1630s. Between them they are the ancestors of many millions. They can be traced back to their grandfather, William Allgar, who was born in about 1530. That’s 2023 to 1530 in ten minutes. So much for genealogical research.

Of course, you’re standing on the shoulders of giants. Ancestry.com obscures that. The primary source research on the Allgars was done all the way back in 1901. The vast overview of their progeny in colonial America was carried out around the same time by some industrious Edwardian genealogists. And the twentieth century stuff was your second cousin. Doesn’t give you much to do does it?

I’m sorry, how is this relevant?

So sorry. I took advantage of this infinite job interview to beat a dead horse.

By way of getting us back on target, let me quickly note that, while I spent a lot of time talking about church records, there are many other sources. And they’re often crucial, given the various gaps. Any historical document that mentions a person by name is a genealogical source. Sometimes, even without gaps, church books aren’t enough. Too many people with the same name, other inconclusive entries. So, depending on the country, I’ve used land records, probate records, censuses, of course. Court records, newspapers, manorial records. Lotta options.

Let’s stick with William Allgar for a second, though. Maybe he’s not completely irrelevant. He lived in the village of Shalford, the churchbook for which begins in 1558. We know he was born around 1530 or maybe a bit before, because his children were being baptized at the Shalford church about thirty years later. And we know per court records and from his will that he was a yeoman farmer, a position below “gentleman” on the social scale but well above the common run of farm laborers. You have to be lucky, but with a person like that—that is, a guy with property—you can sometimes use land and probate records to climb a few more generational rungs back to the 1400s. In William’s case, that hasn’t been done (yet).

But you can see it in the case of the immigrant Thomasine (Frost) Rice (1600-1653), my ancestor and the ancestor of another many millions. Her mother appears in the extant church records of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk in England. Her grandmother’s marriage and burial show up, but she would have been baptized in the mid-1530’s, before the dawn of record-keeping. But back in 1986, the genealogist Harold Porter found the 1590/91 will of John Strutt of the village of Glemsford, Suffolk, showing him to be Thomasine’s great-grandfather. Then he found the will of John’s father Thomas Strutt, a yeoman farmer. And finally he found the will of another John Strutt, father of Thomas, written in September 1516. This earliest John Strutt was a blacksmith, given that he willed his son his shop and his “stuff therin belonginge to Smthescraft.” John the Blacksmith was probably born sometime in the 1460s.

So there you go. Generally speaking, vital records will get you back to the 1600s or 1500s. But if your ancestors were propertied, lived in the right place, and someone does some serious research, you can get back to the 1400s. Maybe even a hundred or so years earlier.

1400s...that’s cool. But you said the seventh century, AD.

Right. Thanks for keeping me honest. The highest branches of your family tree at this point look kind of like an oak in very late autumn. Very few leaves. The few lines soldiering onward are either running on the fumes of the earliest church records, or on the increasingly scant property and court records available for the very thin early modern middle class. That’s most of them, anyway.

But—especially if you’re at all English—you’ve got a chance at this point of hitting the a deeper skein. That is, some of your ancestors may have been gentlefolk. They had more land than a tenant farmer or a blacksmith. And that land, because we’re now entering the tail end of the Middle Ages, was subject to various feudal obligations and constrains. Things are complicated. And quite often that means they are documented. And, primogeniture being what it is, it seems like your ancestors will acquire more land and more titles the further back they go. That is to say, your 12x great-grandfather might have been the 3rd son of a 4th son of a 3rd son of a 2nd son. Eventually you get back to a firstborn heir. Now your ancestors aren’t just gentle, they’re earls, countesses, dukes, duchesses. Kings and Queens! Emperors!

In reality, the fact that you’re descended from King Edward III once is a good indication that you descend from him in at least a dozen other ways. But you’ll never be able to document it. Take what you can get and be happy.

Once you’ve gotten to this point, Robertus be thy nuncle. You have tapped into what Mark Humphrys calls the “World” or at least “Western” Family Tree. You are now connected to everyone else who can do the same. You can say silly but true things like “my husband is my 17th cousin, twice removed.”

Just don’t do anything irresponsible, like copy-paste your medieval family tree from some random online family trees.³

I know offhand, being a well-prepared job interviewer, that Edward III reigned during the Black Death. So we’re only in the 1300s. Not even halfway to the 6th century. How do you propose to bridge the remaining seven hundred years?

Tough crowd. But we can sort this out together. Once you’re talking monarchs, the hard work is over. The future of entire peoples depended on these genealogies. These are the kinds of genealogies people get murdered over. There is, in short, plenty of contemporary evidence.

Thanks to original uploader Muriel Gottrop at English Wikipedia for this fine visual, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

A lot of people like to use Charlemagne (747 - 814) as the origin point of their genealogies. And that’s fine. Makes sense. He’s about as world famous as any ancestor you’re likely to have. And his own genealogy is a bit complicated.

I like to use the much later monarch Henry II of England (1133 - 1183).

Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?

That is for a simple reason: the marvelous Henry Project. Go ahead, click around and marvel. It’s a serious genealogist doing serious work. For me, a silly person whiling away his time in frivolities, its an inspiration, a monument, and a cheat sheet. The internet is awash in terrible medieval genealogy. The Henry Project is your lifeboat. It’s limited in scope, but given the exponential nature of the whole thing (procreation!), it covers a lot of ground. Your Normans, your Saxons, your Picts, your Capetians, your Carolingians. All within the cellular walls of Henry Plantagenet.⁴

And so, it is on that foundation, that I tell you I can trace my family tree back to the 6th century AD. Stewart Baldwin and his editors at the Henry Project have done the truly difficult and occasionally tedious job of determining which exactly of Henry’s II ancestors can be reliably assigned, which are just “best guesses,” and which are medieval or modern fabrications. And there are plenty of those.

The Henry Project does not claim to be comprehensive. It’s not finished, for one thing. Certain lines can go back farther than they currently do. But when it comes to, say, the Dark Age monarches of Dál Riata, it knows a lot more than I ever will. So I feel quite comfortable relying on it. And so, I give you my earliest known ancestor: Fergus Mór of Dal Riata. He may be yours too.

And yes, if any of his nobles, retainers, craftsmen, peasants, and slaves have living descendants, you are certainly descended from them too. But we don’t know their names, and we certainly don’t know how to trace them, person by person, all the way back to us. But Fergus begat Domangart, who begat Gabran, who begat… straight down to begat the Genealogian. And that’s pretty cool. It’s not a cool fact about me. It’s a cool fact about all of humanity and the great genealogists who pulled our collective family history together before it crumbled into dust.

1. I’m an antiquarian by interest and temperament, so I will always prefer the solemn, profound tones of Anno Domini over the bright vulgarity of “the Common Era.” I recall when I first encountered C.E. in high school, and I asked my very conservative history teacher for an explanation. He told me, straight-faced, that it stood for “Christian Europe.” I thought for years that he was ignorant. Now I suspect he was lying to me or lying to himself. He just couldn’t face the truth.

2. This is, of course, laying aside the actual day-to-day problems of genealogy. People appear out of nowhere, change their names, cross oceans without leaving a forwarding address. Entire towns are wiped out by marauding mercenaries then repopulated with a stout set of peasants from Ultima Thule. Many such cases.

3. Like I did when I was 14 years old. Still cleaning my files.

4. There have been various efforts to range a lot wider than that: Arabia, Armenia, Babylon, ancient Egypt and ancient Israel. And the scholarship around the “Descent from Antiquity” is absolutely fascinating. But that’s another day, another post.