Blame France

As if we needed another reason to dislike our traditional enemy! ;)

And simultaneously the source of your historical royalty.

Not keen on royalty. I'm a republican. Not a Republican though, you understand.

This strikes me as funny. It would be like my pointing out that I am or am not for the Lib Dems. While not necessarily a truly strange thing to say, still funny.

Just had to make it clear, since "republican" has two different meanings. Didn't want anyone to associate me with a political party I don't associate myself with. I'm sure the Republican party doesn't want to associate with me either.

And no-one's for the Lib Dems anymore.

I have nothing to add, I just want to be in on this thread when it gets snipped.

PREEMPTIVE SILVERLEAF RAGE!

And just to take us further out on the limb, we've never directly had a French Monarch although it's a common mistake. The Normans, yes, the Angevins, yes, but not the French (although there was a brief period of a few months when the French were technically ruling England and there have been plenty of marriages into the French monarchy).

Most of the place that we call France today wasn't even French until the Angevins totally lost the plot and lost all their lands (and heads), and it's the dual claim to those lands that has led to the whole centuries long antagonism over who had the 'true' right over lands on both sides of the channel.

I'll get my own coat, pipe, and slippers...

Huzzah! I was there before it happened! (The splitting, not the Normans ruling us)

I'm actually of Norman Ancestry, but we left England in 1640 when they refused to persecute Quakers anymore, apparently they were persecuting in the new world, and so we headed right over.

I'm yet to find anyone in my pedigree that wasn't born in England, but the furthest back I've gone is the 1730s. Some branches I've stalled out on in the mid 19th century due to extremely common names. Finding a John Roberts in a large town with a father called John Roberts when neither of them appear in the census I'm concerned with is IMPOSSIBLE.

So note to prospective/future parents: don't give your child a common name, especially if your surname is a common one. And don't for the love of genealogy name a child after a parent or an already-deceased sibling. Just don't.

Well, as a french citizen, I can say that I understand and concurr. See, we have a lot in common, even if we forced you to drink tea by gaining back Aquitaine's wineyards from your Kings

It's fine, we have our own wine now.

And our monarchy has German roots as well! So the situation isn't the wurst it could be....

And Prince Phillip's Greek.

Good old Prince Phillip. Fearlessly putting his foot in his mouth wherever he goes.

We tried tracing the Welsh part of my ancestry back to see where we left from, but 4 generations back we have John Bull and David Smith, so we were done.

Not the most Welsh-sounding of names!

I have to admit I'm most fond of Sylvanus Dunn and Erasmus Orwin in my tree. Sure, they had relatives named after them, but the dates make it obvious who's the "right" one.

Sylvanus is a bit of a posh name for a coal miner though…

Sounds like he was actually a Wood Elf or something :D.

Whereas actually he was a Dwarven miner.

I managed to get back quite far. A week in Scotland, pawing through records with my father, revealed that we can claim Robert Bruce (the bastard son of Robert I) as an ancestor.

Turns out that coal miners, agricultural labourers and steel toolmakers (I have a whole group of Sheffield family who were specifically sheep shear grinders) aren't that easy to trace. They moved around a lot and there wasn't much written about them.

Yep, I'm totally a peasant.

Beats being a potato farmer. My dad traced our family back to the exodus during the potato famine in Ireland before losing resources. And my mum's family, at some point, is from the Silk Road. We know this because of a blood disorder she has that originated along the Silk Road.

My Wife's family are Slovaks fleeing the soviets, Irish escaping the famine and Germans who fought for the Brittish in the Revolution, then took their money and bought a farm in America.  They are much more interesting than a bunch of Quakers whose claim to fame is being on a bunch of town's founding charters because they kept moving west to avoid the non-Quakers.

See, you guys have interesting families who did interesting things.

I'm totally good with being working class stock, I just wish some of my ancestors did something more exciting than move around the country from coal mine to coal mine.

Actually my great-great-grandfather died in the Somme in WW1. That's quite interesting.

But my boyfriend has me beat there. His great-great-uncle (I think) also died in WW1, but he was awarded the Victoria Cross.

I'm desperate to find someone who went to prison, or got deported, or emigrated, or lived with a member of the same sex in a "secret" relationship, or something.

I started making one of those word cloud diagrams (you know, the ones where the size of the word indicates how frequently it appears in your list) of my direct ancestors' occupations, as collected from census data. I gave it up because the words

COAL MINER

were so big you that's all you could see (apart from sheep shear grinder and agricultural labourer which were still tiny in comparison).

Loretta Lynn loves you.

My family tree is a total clustermess. One strand of the family basically goes back forever in the same few villages in Dorset, mostly farmers until the last century or so when they were mostly shopkeepers. The rest of it is a spaghetti heap of dead ends with Irish, French, Canadian, and a bunch of other influences including some who seem to have existed in the 19th century equivalent of being completely off the grid.

My kids will have it even harder as my wife's family aren't actually sure about their lineage beyond the last couple of generations, although it's highly likely that the family name came from a Russian soldier who went to Hungary and changed his name to something that sounded a little more Hungarian. Apparently it's a fairly unique surname that is not normal for Hungary but which is used in the Persian region, so there could be an even more convoluted backstory involving a Persian family migrating to Russia and then into Hungary. But there are still more complications that muddy the waters of this part of the story even further, and with so many public records lost, destroyed, or forged during the successive Nazi and Communist occupations nobody really has a scooby about their true geneology. We just like to say that we're starting the family anew from these existing generations

My grandfather's grandfather was apparently a well known Jewish leader of some type, at least in his region of the Pale of Settlement, earning the family name Kadushin, yiddish for Holy One.

When we were in Israel in 1982, we went to a Kibbutz where that same grandfather's cousin lived. My sister and I got to meet our 3rd cousins, though we couldn't talk to them much, since we only spoke English and they mostly only spoke Hebrew.

My grandmother, in her 80s, revealed in an interview that we have on tape, that she was 'a love child'. Her birth broke up two families. She had a lot of older half-siblings, many of whom resented her and treated her poorly. Her husband, my grandfather, grew up in an orphanage. He had many siblings in the orphanage, but said they were kinda just like everyone else, rather than feeling close. Due to both of them missing out on strong family ties growing up, they were both very focused on family and it has led to fairly strong bonds in their children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren.

My wife likes to tell the story of her family tumbleweed. When she was researching her genealogy, she started coming across a bunch of familiar names and realized that not too many generations back a couple of close cousins had married. In fact, she also tells the story of, I think her grandmother talking to her mother, saying something along the lines of, 'I wonder what life would be like if we'd stayed on the farm and you'd married your cousins, like everyone else.' That's rural eastern Kentucky for you.

I don't really know much about my family. I know my mum's parents spent a lot of time in India but they weren't actually Indian, I don't think. My dad's family goes back quite a way in the UK. He said somewhere back along the line was a bloke who operated Tower Bridge - as in, activated the controls to raise/lower it when ships were going through and stuff. And we've got a book about lepidoptra by someone on my dad's side which has notes in it in red pen, like it was an earlier version of the book and he was gonna get it reprinted or something.

My family tree only goes back a little bit past when my family immigrated to the US, around my great/ great-great grandparents generation. But one of my great-grandfathers made the newspapers. Just google Morris Fox trunk murder.

Reading you all debating about your family trees has me wanting to play the Sims 3 again.

My tree has only a few notable things.

A noble title was involved at some point in the past, the last one to wear it was a passionate swimmer who wrote books about natation, and was rumored to be able to sleep while swimming. It was a very distant branch of the family.

One of my great grand parents was the only of 17 children to not become a priest, monk or nun. He was known for his white beard that he milked (painted whiter with milk) every morning and his love of young female ballet dancers (no milking involved).

Also, witches and sorcerors.

Well I throughly hate the French Government right now (which was the familiar topic when this thread originated), do we have enough French people on this forum to plot another Revolution?