The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1897-06-20
FROM WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR..
Many Americans Can Trace Their An
cestraA Lines to Him.

Dr. David Starr Jordan, in June Arena.
We can show fundamentally that the
child of to-day must have had at the time OF
Alfred the Great an ancestry Of S7O,6I2 ,O00, OOO
persons. In the time of William the Con-
queror (thirty generauonS) TINS numDer
reaches S59S. 094 1872 This is shown by the
ents, four grandparents, eight great-grand.
parents, and so on. AS the number or
Englishmen in Alfred's time, or even in
Williams, was but a very small fraction
of these numbers, most of these ancestors
must have been repeated many times in the
calculation. Each person who leaves de-
scendants is Il link in the great chain OF
life, or rather a strand in life's great net
work. The blood of each single person i'll
Alfred'S time who left capable descendants
enduring to our day IS represented IN every
family of strict English descent. In other
words, every Englishman is descended from
Alfred the Great as very likely also from
the peasant woman whose cakes Alfred Is
reputed to have burned. Moreover, there
are few if any who do not share the blood
of William the Conqueror. Most ancestral
lines, if they could be traced, would go back
to him by a hundred different strains. In
fact, there are few families in the south
and east of England who have not more
Norman blood than the present royal fam
lily. The House of Guelph holds the throne
not through nearness to William, but
through primogeniture, thing very diner
ent from heredity.
Mr. Edward j. Edwards, of Minneapolis,
has recently sent me some very interesting est I'M
concern the lineage of his little daughter,
my niece, Mary Stockton Edwards.
Mr. Edwards finds that the little girl, like
millions of others, is descended through at
least two different lines from William the
Conqueror The lineage of one of these
leads in thirty-tWo generations through the
family names of Jordan, Hawley, Waldo,
Elderkin Drake, Grenville, Courteney De
Bohun and Plantagenet to William the
Conqueror Sir Humphrey De Bohum mar
ried Elizabeth Plantagenet. daughter of
King Edward l. In the ancestry of King
Edward are the Saxon kings Cedric, Egbert
with other royal lines brings In Hengist,
Hugh Capet, Charlemagne, Otho the Great
Duncan, Rurik, Igor San Fernando and a
host of other notables of w hom one would
have less right to be proud. The Courte-
neys, earls of Devon, are again descended
from the royal lines of France (Hugh CapeO
and Russia, but not from William the Con-
queror To Courteney and Plantagenet
again the Edwards lineage has been traced
along another and quite different line.
The seventy family names, more or less,
traced in the first series, containing per-
haps a thousand representatives, are only
so many out of billions, if there were no
Implications. If there had been no repeti-
tons, there would be instead of. the thou
sand known ancestors, four billions of per-
William the Conqueror. This genealogy Is
therefore but a strand from an enormous
network, which, if written out in full,
would cover the earth with names. Only
through the family pride of the Courteneys
and brakes this fragment of personal de
scent and personal history ha t5o ibetd TO
record of the plebeian descendants of the
Puritan John Drake of Windsor forms
junction with the sacred annals of the
English peerage.
Most of the English people named in these
records lived in Devon and Sussex, from
which region their descendants came to
America. The subordinate lines traced out
lead to the feudal lords of these two coun-
ties The interesting fact however is that
in this there is nothing exceptional These
people in America were New England
farmers for the most part, squires and
in no respect singular Their sole i'm
portant heritage was the Puritan con-
cnipnnn -