Newsgroups: soc.roots
Date:         Sun, 3 Jan 1993 16:22:37 ADT
Reply-To:     holloway@ESSEX.STFX.CA
From:         holloway@ESSEX.STFX.CA
Subject:      Royalty GEDCOM, & the Rump-Pennell debate
Comments: To: roots-l@vm1.NoDak.EDU

Over the past few days something of a little polemic has developed
on the uses of Royal pedigrees in messages(articles?) by F Rump &
C R Pennell (I'm afraid I don't have an easy way to edit other people's
messages into mine.  Hopefully you can figure out what I'm referring to.)
Anyway, since it all started w/a query from me, perhaps I should comment.

First of all, I don't think I was attracted to this racket (genealogy)
because of any interest in "breeding" or my own genetic background.
(Sometimes I hope I got nothing in common w/my immediate kin!)
It's not so much for "bragging rights" as for two more pragmatic
reasons that I'm interested tracing connects to the "rich and famous".

1) Rich people seem to leave a heck of a lot more documentation
about their lives.  Just a few generations back, nearly all my
ancestors are farmers of whom I have very little knowledge.  Many lines
just go nowhere: people too poor to leave any paper trace (or even
in a few cases maybe hiding out from past misdeeds.)   (I'd be curious
to know if other readers share my deduction here for those difficult
ancestors being probably "of lowly means.")

But once in a while there's a line that connects into the "colonial
elite" and documentation.  At that point the rule of elites marrying
elites works in your favour and you've got bunches of new lines
to follow.  It doesn't mean they're any more or less worthy:
they're just a lot easier to trace!

How this connects to royal pedigrees, is when you get back to
17th and 18th Century immigrants.  I've got maybe a couple dozen
such immigrants now and having looked at English and German
records it seems to me that unless they connect into even the
lowest orders of the peerage that's going to be the end of the
of the search.  Parish records don't make it.

One example w/all attendent problems:  John Drake a founding
father of Windsor/Hartford, CT.  The older family histories
link him to the cadet line of very minor Devon country gentry.
But with that minor connection and the COMPLETE PEERAGE and Burkes
you can go lots of interesting places, such as Drake-Grenville-
Courtney-Bohun- Edward I.  (In the last year or two the
older Drake genealogies have been challenged on the basis
that John Drake wasn't accorded enough respect in America
to even be a minor-minor peer (more on that later) but
it gives you something to argue and speculate about.)

2) (Trying to be brief) History.  I've always been interested
but it helps to have some personal connection to events you read
about.  I don't know New England very well but I now look for books
on Colonial history.  And every so often, there's the name of
a distant cousin (Webster, Drake, Colt, Sherman, Arnold,
Brewster, Fosdick, Hopkins) to give the story a little extra
spice.  Some day I hope to visit these New England places-
Taunton, Marshfield, Dartmouth, Cape Cod, Providence,
Sctuate, Windsor- and I'm sure it will mean more to me and
my daughter to know the history and the family connection.

There's more I want to say, but this is too long already.

Steven K Holloway   Internet:  Holloway@essex.stfx.ca
  St Francis Xavier Univ,  Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, B2G 1C0
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU