Horace Round and Royal myths

[PDel...@aol.com]

Horace Round, that great debunker of many Genealogical myths, stated that
if he were given an english person with at least 4 English/British
grandparents he could prove their descent from a British royal. One of my great
great grandfathers, issue of a good long Cheshire yeoman pedigree, refuted that
argument and put him to the test

Round found, after 14 years of diligent research, apart from his other
commitments, that his patron was right in his case. He found a gammut of
'knightly families' amongts his ancestors , but not a jot of Royal blood. i have
gone over round's searches with modern tools and found the same.

Peter ( de Loriol)

[Peter Stewart]

Were they Quakers? It seems highly improbable that none of their wives
carried in any line to royal blood if they were all Anglicans down to
the 19th century.

Peter Stewart

[PDel...@aol.com]

No they were not quakers, just 'god fearing (or not) plainspeakin' country
folk.

~Peter

[Renia]

As I've said before, 3 of my grandparents' generations were either
gentry or aristocrats, but only a couple of distant lines lead into
royalty, hence my disbelief at half of what is written and claimed here.

[Cherryexile]

> As I've said before,  3 of my grandparents' generations were either
> gentry or aristocrats, but only a couple of distant lines lead into
> royalty, hence my disbelief at half of what is written and claimed here.

There is the bias of the platform to take into account.

I suggest that because so many people visit here because they have
found a line back to the medieval period (which is oviously easier to
do for Royal and aristocratic lines), there are a disproportionate
number of people with Royal desecnt that make up the population of
posters? The internet feeds this bias by providing links for the
descendents of the people who get refered to on here to the site to
follow.

That isn't to say that a lot of links that people would like to
believe in are not full of holes (or not quite proven, but likely;
depending on your point of view).

I'm always quite struck by how few multiple links there are in my
family tree; with the exeption of the one that links in with Royalty
and none of those after 1650 (that I can find to date).

My intuition still suggests that links to Royalty are relatviely
uncommon, rather than the norm.

[taf]

On Nov 27, 1:55 am, PDelor...@aol.com wrote:
> Horace Round, that great debunker of many Genealogical myths, stated that
> if he were given an english person with at least 4 English/British
> grandparents  he could prove their descent from a British royal.

Well, that was a really blinkered bit of hyperbole. Whole swaths of
the great unwashed would have had at least 4 English great-
grandparents but couldn't be traced beyond their great-great-
grandparents.


taf

[Simon Fairthorne]

But when Round was writing grandparents would take you back pre 1837, the
equivalent statement now would need at least two more generations

simon

-------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to
GEN-MEDIEV...@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the
quotes in the subject and the body of the message

[taf]

On Nov 27, 8:20 am, "Simon Fairthorne" <fairtho...@breathe.com> wrote:
> But when Round was writing grandparents would take you back pre 1837, the
> equivalent statement now would need at least two more generations

Not sure how this changes things. I am thinking of my great-
grandfather, a Somerset coal miner and contemporary of Round. He had
6 English great-grandparents (just 6, his parents apparently being
first cousins). I can't identify a single one of their parents, (the
miner's great-great-grandparents) let alone prove a royal descent, and
I doubt Round could have done much better - what records do survive
contain too many people of the same names (one great-grandfather could
match any of 6 contemporary baptisms, for example), and these aren't
the type to leave wills. A lot of groundwork may have turned up an
old crone that could give one more generation, but I think Round was
ignoring a whole social stratum when he made this pronouncement.

taf

[PDel...@aol.com]

Round was proving a point about a Somerset labouring family, the Perrys,
who oddly enough I knew when I was at school in Somerset(their descendants
that is!). He had once been given a seemingly pointless exercise to prove his
point and the chosen family was out of a hat, so to speak. His findings
were eventually given to the family with a copy given to the
Ashmolean....What he was trying to prove was that Anybody could prove a royal ascent
irrespective of their social background.....He used Bishops Transcripts for the
most part as they were tenants of the Bishop of Wells.

Peter (de L)

[Peter Stewart]

I doubt that Round knew very much about tracking ancestry through 18th-
and 17th-century parish registers or other available records when he
made the claim - or even after he had finished trying to substantiate
it. But I suppose he based his idea not so much on his chances of
penetrating into unfamiliar social strata as on his knowledge of social
mobility in England in the late medieval and early modern eras.

One notable Australian "gateway" to royal ancestry (also an American
one, though no-one has yet brought it up on the newsgroup) is through a
mining family, via the daughter of a Somerset gentleman whose
socio-economic ruin was due to insanity. Round perhaps thought the
English countryside in the 17th & 18th centuries was hopping with people
like him.

Peter Stewart

[David Teague]

From: co...@btconnect.com
Subject: Re: Horace Round and Royal myths

Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 05:56:56 -0800
To: gen-me...@rootsweb.com


<snip> 

My intuition still suggests that links to Royalty are relatviely uncommon, rather than the norm.

<snip>

What I've suspected for years is that the most common form of Royal Descent is illegitimate.
David Teague

[Wjhonson]

The reason for me why links to royalty are important is not as much in the link itself as in its dust.

The dust is all the people who are swirling around those connections but just on the edge of your vision today.
Those are the people I research in the main.
The masters of the buckhounds, the keepers of the forest, the pensioners and collectors and so on.
Those are the ones whose full stories have not yet been told.
But could be. Possibly. And just might lead to new connections being found or highlighted.

[Leo]

Dear Peter,

A pity Horace Round said he could "prove" a descent from a British Royal.
If he had said "there has to be a descent" I think he would have been
correct.

British Royals go back to the House of Wessex and about the year 500.

To say emphatically that your great-great-grandfather did _not_ have royal
ancestors, he would have to have _all_ ancestors beyond the year 500. And he
didn't...............and so the possibility/probability remains.

"Your Family Tree" published in 1929, page 13 : "To quote from a recent
statement by Dr. E. M. Best of McGill University, Montreal: "Every one of us
is descended from William the Conqueror, and Anglo-Saxons are, all of us, at
least thirtieth cousins to each other."

Page 15 ....as in such progression (of ancestors) the sum of the series is
equivalent (minus two) to its highest term, each descendant (of Isabel de
Vermandois) should have 33,554,432 intervening forbears, making 67,108,862
in all. Again, each child of this generation has twice as many ancestors as
either parent --- that is 134,217,724 in all.

This, however, has led us to figures manifestly impossible in view of the
fact that the total population of England in 1100 did not exceed two
millions, and that probably not one-tenth of these, beset as they were by
war and pestilence, left permanent lines of descendants.

-- If I understand this correctly, about the year 1100, there were about
200,000 people who are the ancestors of all present day Anglo-Saxons, and
people with Anglo-Saxon blood.

Peter's great-great-grandfather was one of those. The theoretical number of
his ancestors around the year 500 is definitely astronomically, and all
those lines have to go through a bottleneck around 1100 and those 200,000
people.

A pity that Round said he could "prove" as for the biggest part of that
ancestor of Peter no records exist to either prove or disprove. Which is why
I think he should have said probably/likely/ no doubt but unproveable.

Leo van de Pas

----- Original Message -----
From: <PDel...@aol.com>
To: <GEN-MED...@rootsweb.com>
Sent: Sunday, November 27, 2011 8:55 PM
Subject: Horace Round and Royal myths


> Horace Round, that great debunker of many Genealogical myths, stated that
> if he were given an english person with at least 4 English/British

> grandparents he could prove their descent from a British royal. One of my
> great
> great grandfathers, issue of a good long Cheshire yeoman pedigree,
> refuted that
> argument and put him to the test
>
> Round found, after 14 years of diligent research, apart from his other
> commitments, that his patron was right in his case. He found a gammut of
> 'knightly families' amongts his ancestors , but not a jot of Royal blood.
> i have
> gone over round's searches with modern tools and found the same.
>

> Peter ( de Loriol)

[Peter Stewart]

On 28/11/2011 7:59 AM, David Teague wrote:
>
> From: co...@btconnect.com
> Subject: Re: Horace Round and Royal myths
> Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 05:56:56 -0800
> To: gen-me...@rootsweb.com
>
>

> <snip> My intuition still suggests that links to Royalty are

> relatviely uncommon, rather than the norm.
>

> <snip>
>
> What I've suspected for years is that the most common form of Royal
> Descent is illegitimate.

I don't see how that could possibly work on the bare numbers - did many
royal persons have more illegitimate than legitimate offspring?

Peter Stewart

[taf]

I actually think this may be right. If you start with the Norman
kings, by the third generation there were more illegitimates than
legitimates. Were all lines, legitimate and illegitimate, to then
have similar fecundity from that point on, there would be more
illegitimate royal descents than legitimate ones, even were all
subsequent kings to have only legitimates. Any additional
illegitimates would only take a further proportion out of the
legitimate lines and into the illegitimates, while all children among
the illegitimate would increase their numbers independent of the
status of their birth. Even a 'chaste' king like Edward I only manages
to maintain the status quo with regard to proportions, while you then
have kings like Charles II who tried their hardest, single-handed, to
obliterate the ratios. The only force that would have the ability to
balance this one-way flow is the strong likelihood that the legitimate
lines had higher average fecundity.

taf

[taf]

Had he said that it is not impossible that anyone might have such a
provable descent, I would accept that, but to say that anyone _can_
prove such a descent shows an ignorance of the difficulties in
researching such families. In his example, he got incredibly lucky.
Even with the not-all-that-common name of James Norman, if you have 6
of them born within a decade in the parish, you just can't get any
farther. He may well have been a scion of the landed family of the
same surname that had been in the neighboring parish two centuries
earlier, but you will never know it. If another set of great-
grandparents were from the neighboring parish where the records have
been lost prior to 1805, and the third set are vaguely 'from Essex',
then you're done, full stop. Admittedly he had an easier time of it
before the loss of so many Somerset records, but still, when you have
nothing but parish registers to go by, you have a high failure rate
and he was gambling on the assumption that the rate of expansion in
the ancestor pool as you went back would outpace the rate at which
lines become blocked due to the inability to distinguish people of the
same name, flaws in the surviving parish registers, and sudden
appearances without indication of parish of origin. I doubt that this
was a good bet.

taf

[David Teague]

True enough, Mr F.
And that's even without adding all the various wrinkles, such as the fact that, as time wore on, you had increasing numbers of people with what we might call "double" or "mixed" status. I can think of these quite easily:
1. People descended from the legitimate offspring of at least one king in at least one line, who have/had at least one secondary descent from the illegitimate offspring of at least one king;
2. People descended from the legitimate offspring of kings, but through at least one illegitimate offspring in a later generation; which leads us to
3. Special cases like John of Gaunt's Beaufort children (originally illegitimate, but retroactively legitimated, either by dispensation, or through the subsequent marriage of the parents in question to each other.
My father, as a descendant of one of Alice Freeman Thompson Parke's ggg granddaughters (Alice Freeman -- Bridget Thompson -- Hannah Denison -- Mary Saxton -- Mary Minor -- Mary Chipman) is descended from the Saxon kings of England via Ethelred II, and the old Scots royal house via Malcolm II. This is, of course, a legitimate line of descent, albeit one running through quite a number of daughters rather than sons. He is also almost certainly descended from a granddaughter of colonial Maryland immigrant John Baynard, a line which has never been claimed as being of Plantagenet origin via any means other than through Henry II's acknowledged bastard son, William Longespee, so far as I know. 
In other words, given "world enough and time,"people with at least one illegitimate descent from royalty will eventually outnumber those persons whose descents from this, or that, monarch are always legitimate, in every line.
David Teague
----------------------------------------
> From: t...@clearwire.net

> Subject: Re: Horace Round and Royal myths

> Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 15:08:55 -0800
> To: gen-me...@rootsweb.com

[John Watson]

Hi Peter,

As a perfectly ordinary person from a perfectly ordinary family in the
north of England, I can trace my ancestry back to royalty, but I have
been very lucky. I can trace all of my ancestors back to about the
1780's - most of them farm labourers, miners, butchers, bakers, shoe
makers and shopkeepers. There is only one line that I can trace back
further to the 16th century and minor gentry and eventually to a
younger son of a great house, the Vavasours of Hazlewood. His
ancestors were Percys, Nevilles, Scropes, etc. and so on back to
Edward III. The luck is that the people in this line lived in two
Yorkshire parishes for which the parish registers are just about
continuous, including the civil war period, and that many of them left
wills that have survived.

Regards,
John

[Wjhonson]

But again with the example of "James Norman", you are picking AN ancestor and stating that you can't go further.
Round wasn't stating that you could pick one. That was the point.
You can't pick the royal line.
You have to supply your 16 ggrandparents and ONE of those will have a royal line,
Not each of them. He never said each of them.

[Peter Stewart]

I'm not convinced - the Normans are not the ultimate royal ancestry
anyway, but from the third generation all of William the Conqueror's
known lines to the present day were through descendants of his two
youngest children, Adela of Blois and Henry I.

Adela had three sons and one daughter, all by her husband, with
countless modern descendants through their legitimate offspring.

Henry had, I think, two illegitimate sons with known modern descendants
(Robert of Gloucester and Rainald of Cornwall) with one other (William
de Tracy) who may also have some. There were five (or perhaps six)
illegitimate daughters with descendants living today, but I doubt that
all of them put together could match the numbers descended from Henry's
legitimate daughter Matilda the Empress.

Of course a proportion of her descendants are through illegitimate
links, but considering that half of royal persons are female, highly
unlikely to have recorded bastards, and that of the males very few
indeed had more of these than legitimate children, I would guess that
the numbers are well truly in favour of legitimate lines of descent.

A few exceptions (like Charles II) may tilt the perception, but I
seriously doubt that reality matches it.

Peter Stewart

[Peter Stewart]

On 28/11/2011 9:24 AM, Johnny Brananas wrote:
>> One notable Australian "gateway" to royal ancestry (also an American
>> one, though no-one has yet brought it up on the newsgroup) is through a
>> mining family, via the daughter of a Somerset gentleman whose
>> socio-economic ruin was due to insanity. Round perhaps thought the

>> English countryside in the 17th& 18th centuries was hopping with people
>> like him.
> I've sometimes wondered about physical deformities or mental
> deficiencies when you come across "unequal" marriages in the
> records ... for instance, a knight's daughter married to a yeoman.
> People are not always born "perfect," even today. Perhaps the parents
> had to do the best they could for a child with physical problems,
> etc. And usually these things would not be commented on in records.
>

Before the Reformation people born with physical disability would often
be sent as children to become monks or nuns - certainly there were a
number of blind, mute, lame or hunchbacked religious. Later on if
surviving long enough (in Britain anyway) they might have been burned as
witches & warlocks, I suppose. Or married to to an underling, as you
suggest. In some families the pyre might have been preferred.

Peter Stewart

[taf]

I am not picking AN ancestor. I am giving an example of what can
happen to truncate a line, and it not only eliminates that one
connection - it eliminates any possibility of connecting in that whole
quadrant. I also gave examples of other ways that a line can fail to
produce a proven royal ancestry. The effect of these potential
problems is to produce a cumulative probability of failure. Yes,
James is just one, but these things happen, and if they happen enough,
you aren't left with ANY possible avenues. Round needs the pedigree
to broaden faster than these problems extinguish the possibilities of
each individual line, and I strongly suspect that in some regions at
some time periods, this expectation would not be met.

You normally have 8 g-grandparents (not 16). My guy had 6 - not 6
known, just six. Two were from a parish without surviving records for
a time-gap too long to be bridged, but that's ok, since there are 4
more, right (and remember that Round said you just had to have 4
British ones, so all the better). But 2 were 'from Essex' with names
too common to enable them to be distinguished. Now I am down to 2.
But that's alright because Round never said each of them, right?
James, well we talked about James. That leaves James' wife, and nobody
of her name can be found anywhere in the area. That leaves zero. You
see, I AM talking about any of them, not each of them. Is this bad
luck? yes, but I don't think, for this region and time, that it is
incredibly bad luck, and I suspect you will find people in other areas
(London, for example) with similar difficulties, and anyhow Round was
betting against bad luck when he make this type of absolute
declaration. Could Round, if he was looking at this 100 years ago,
find a connection to an earlier generation? possibly, but given the
'fail' rate, the two new-found g-g-grandparents seem just as likely to
be untraceable.

taf

[Wjhonson]

There is always a possibility.
Isn't it a bit defeatist to say that no new records will emerge to address the point?
There are new records emerging constantly. No one can visit every single repository in a county or realize that a family has taken their deeds from Shropshire to Ireland and only now are publishing them for the first time.

You can never say that fifth cousin Mabel, who just died and had inherited her great great great grandmothers family bible which got sold to a junk dealer and has now appeared on ebay and just happens to name the parents of your fourth great grandfather and that they were "from Cardiff".

happens all the time... constantly... daily.

-----Original Message-----
From: taf <t...@clearwire.net>
To: gen-medieval <gen-me...@rootsweb.com>
Sent: Sun, Nov 27, 2011 7:21 pm
Subject: Re: Horace Round and Royal myths

[taf]

But this is looking at the wrong question, I think. You don't need
each generation of Matilda's descendants to have more illegitimate
than legitimate children for the illegitimate to be bigger. You just
need them to have fewer legitimate children than the total of their
illegitimate children plus all of the children, legitimate and
illegitimate, born to the lines descended from earlier royal bastards.
They illegitimate side of the ledger doesn't even have to break even
to keep up, as they benefit from each new bastard born to the
legitimate side.

Of course, if you start at William I or James I or George III, you
will get a different outcome (thanks to Henry I, Charles II, James II
and William IV), than if you start with, say, Ecgberht or Henry III or
Victoria. If, say, you started with Edward the Elder or Edward I, all
of their legitimates and no illegitimates (depending on how you view
Athelstan) may give enough of a head start that the illegitimate side
never catches up.

taf

[taf]

On Nov 27, 7:32 pm, Wjhonson <wjhon...@aol.com> wrote:
>  There is always a possibility.
> Isn't it a bit defeatist to say that no new records will emerge to address the point?
> There are new records emerging constantly.  No one can visit every single repository in a county or realize that a family has taken their deeds from Shropshire to Ireland and only now are publishing them for the first time.
>

I am not saying that no new records can possibly emerge, but the
theoretical possibility that at some point in the future a critical
record might come to light is insufficient to let Round off the hook
for claiming that every Englishman had a provable royal ancestry. If
his claim was the double negative, that you can't disprove that every
Englishman has royal descent, then fine, since you can never discount
such future records, his claim would have to stand (as must any claim
that cannot possibly be falsified), although it would be completely
valueless. That's not what he said though. He made the positive
affirmation that you could prove a line for everyone.

taf

[Peter Stewart]

With a European frame of reference (and why has this too defaulted to a
British one?) there would be no catching up with the fact that a horde
of Charlemagne's legitimate descendants existed by the time of William
the Conqueror, while none of the emperor's bastards left any progeny at
all (discounting Alpaidis, who was almost certainly not his daughter).

Of bastards in the next generation of Carolingians, Bernard of Italy
sired the Vermandois line (from whom I bet there is no living descendant
without more legitimate lines to Charlemagne anyway) and Alpaidis had
two sons without modern lines of descent.

There are no recorded bastards in the following generation who left
issue. The in the next there were only Bertha of Arles/Tuscany and
Emperor Arnulf (with no modern descendants). Ditto the latter's son
Zwentibold who was the only bastard to have children in the next...

Of cousre this is only the male line, but the pickings are very slim
indeed for your proposal to be realised across the Channel.

As for Charles II, the legitimate descendants of his grandfather James I
far exceed the illegitimate ones - in the 18th and 19th centuries
European royal families outbred their British ducal cousins many, many
times over.

Peter Stewart

[PDel...@aol.com]

Agreed in principle! at least half of my Royal ascents are through an
illegitimate line. There was, in my youth, a saying that all the British middle
class was descended from Edward I . I think that this relied on Horace
Round's principle of his then 4 sets of English Grandparents!

Peter

[Peter Stewart]

On 28/11/2011 5:37 PM, Peter Stewart wrote:

> With a European frame of reference (and why has this too defaulted to
> a British one?) there would be no catching up with the fact that a
> horde of Charlemagne's legitimate descendants existed by the time of
> William the Conqueror, while none of the emperor's bastards left any
> progeny at all (discounting Alpaidis, who was almost certainly not his
> daughter).
>
> Of bastards in the next generation of Carolingians, Bernard of Italy
> sired the Vermandois line (from whom I bet there is no living
> descendant without more legitimate lines to Charlemagne anyway) and
> Alpaidis had two sons without modern lines of descent.
>
> There are no recorded bastards in the following generation who left
> issue. The in the next there were only Bertha of Arles/Tuscany and
> Emperor Arnulf (with no modern descendants). Ditto the latter's son
> Zwentibold who was the only bastard to have children in the next...
>
> Of cousre this is only the male line, but the pickings are very slim
> indeed for your proposal to be realised across the Channel.
>
> As for Charles II, the legitimate descendants of his grandfather James
> I far exceed the illegitimate ones - in the 18th and 19th centuries
> European royal families outbred their British ducal cousins many, many
> times over.

I should have pointed out that descent from Bernard of Italy may provide
a legitimate royal ancestry anyway, since he was a king despite being
the son of a concubine.

And in the Capetian royal line there was no known bastard who left
offspring until the 12th century (Isabelle, daughter of Louis VI) unless
counting in Florus the son of Philippe I from his marriage to Bertrade
de Montfort in the preceding generation. The prolific cadet lines of
Burgundy and Vermandois had branched off before Isabelle and those of
Dreux and Courtenay started from the same generation as her. I don't
think there was a bastard line with descendants to the present day from
any of them before the 14th century, though there were many thousands of
legitimate descendants of Hugo Capet by that time. Even the Bourbon
kings' legitimate descendants today vastly outnumber those with links
through bastards. Ditto Hapsburgs and Romanovs.

Peter Stewart