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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 2000-07 > 0964069617


From: Stewart Baldwin< >
Subject: Re: Royal Descent of Americans
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 05:06:57 GMT


On 19 Jul 2000 18:19:29 -0700, wrote:

>You know why the English have such difficulty in finding their royal
>ancestry? Two reasons: first of all, very few people in England do descend
>from royalty,

Not true. The number of English who have royal descent is a large
percentage of the whole. It is just that the number of DOCUMENTED
descents is much smaller.

>while millions of Americans of British heritage do because it
>was the wealthy aristocracy's descendants who went to America to begin with.

Nonsense. American immigrants were from a wide cross section, from
very rich to very poor. The number of aristocratic immigrants has
been greatly exaggerated, partly due to the large number of poor
genealogies which make false claims of noble blood for a large number
of immigrants.

>Secondly, Americans in the Colonies simply kept better birth, marriage, and
>death records than were kept in England at the time, and, more importantly, th
>eir descendants realized the importance of these records and preserved them.

Also false. New England is the only area that has really good vital
records in colonial times (so if you have New England ancestry, you
will generally have a much easier time tracing your genealogy than
most Anericans), and some churches also have good records. Many
states didn't start having a good set of vital records until the late
1800's, some not until the early 1900's.

>This is why Massachusetts vital records all the way back to the founding of
>the colony, and to England can readily be found. The towns of Massachusetts
>published these records in the mid-19th century in books, one for each town.
>They contain records back to before 1600. I am told the average Brit can't
>get back any further than that, and it isn't any surprise to me, as the
>earliest vital records available (that were kept on a regular basis) date
>only from 1830 in Britain.

Very misleading. England has its parish registers, going back in many
parishes to the mid 1500's, giving a much better set of vital records
in England during the 1700's and 1800's than you will find in most
American states. I have mostly American colonial ancestry, but one of
my great-grandmothers was a daughter of English immigrants (and poor
ones at that), and I have traced her ancestry in many lines back to
the 1500's. Having done research in both types of records (so I am
speaking from experience), I would have to say that I find it easier
in general to make progress on English lines in the 1600's and 1700's
than American ones, with the exception of a few American groups (like
Quakers and New England) which have much better than average records.
(I am fortunate to have a large Quaker ancestry, but nearly all of my
non-Quaker American lines have proved troublesome once I reach the
1700's.)

>Also, once one gets back to before 1600, and
>certainly before 1500 (easily attainable for Americans of British descent,
>since our Colonial forefathers saw to it), it's a piece of cake to begin
>finding nobles, and, yes, royals, popping out of the woodwork. And, no, these
>are not the "spurious" genealogies you Brits love to point to when attempting
>to disprove the royal descent of Americans; these links can be found in the
>most trusted of sources. Blame your inability to find your own royal ancestry
>on the people who came before you and didn't keep the records of it: your
>English ancestors who were too timid to sail to the New World and build a new
>nation.

It is only a "piece of cake" to find nobles and royals "popping out of
the woodwork" for American immigrants because there are a very large
number of false royal descents littering virtually every genealogical
library in the country, and an awful lot of gullible people who are
willing to believe them just because they are printed in a
fancy-looking (or not so fancy-looking) book and tell them something
that they want to hear. True, there are well documented royal
descents for American immigrants, but the number of spurious descents
is MUCH greater than the number of genuine ones.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a significant number of
readers of this group who BELIEVE that they have a valid royal
descent, but in fact only have one of the many fake ones that have
appeared in such large quantities. Of course, there are also readers
of this group who have validly documented royal lines. The thing is,
the people who are in the first group all believe that they are in the
second group, and that I must be talking about someone else when I
mention the existence of the people in the first group. (Myself, I
belong to a third group, i.e., those people who don't have a well
documented royal line and actually realize it. I have a couple of
good shots, including one promising one that only needs to be shored
up in a couple of places, but there is still a gap in the
documentation. On the other hand, I also have several fake royal
lines that have appeared in the literature, so I have the option of
joining the first group any time I choose, simply by taking a
gullibility pill.)

Stewart Baldwin

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