Is Aliénor d'Aquitaine your ancestor? [closed]

+39 votes
2.3k views

Aliénor d'Aquitaine is one of the most fascinating women in European history. According to her profile on Roglo, a data base pretty much centered around European Aristocracy, Aliénor has over 1.3 million descendants in the said data base, this number representing more than 15% of the total number of profiles. The actual number of descendants of Aliénor is of course far larger than that, but how large?

My conjecture is that Aliénor stands at the right place and time to be a potential ancestor of about anyone living today and having European ancestors - that means I guess, over 99,99% of WikiTreers. What arguments have I to support this conjecture?

#1. Aliénor married a king of France and a king of England. In less than five generations, she had descendants all over Europe., from Russia to Portugal, and Scandinavia to Italy.

#2. The theoretical number of ancestors living in the 12th century, barring pedigree collapse, for someone living today, is in the 100 million range (based on a mean of 27 generations), which is the range of European population at the time. Of course if you are able to track your ancestors that far away in time, you are bound to meet pedigree collapse, and the more so if you attach somehow your ancestry to European aristocracy, who was pretty much endogamic.

If this conjecture is challenging, it's also certainly practically undecidable. If you actually have found Aliénor in your ancestors, it does comfort your belief in the conjecture, but it does not prove it true. But OTOH if you have not found her so far, it does not prove the conjecture false either, because you have not, and nobody will ever have, a complete list of your ancestors living in the 12th century (remember, potentially millions of them), which would be necessary to show a counter-example, if any.

True, false or undecidable, this conjecture is worth exploring, why not through a dedicated project here in WikiTree?

- Figuring out the actual number of Aliénor's descendants currently in WikiTree, and why not flag them (sticker, whatever)

- Working towards expanding the existing branches, in particular those spinning off the main trunk of European aristocracy.

- Any other idea ...

[edited 2021-08-03] : alternative form of the question : Who can track her ancestors back to before 1200, and has NOT Aliénor among them?

[edited 2021-10-12] : I have kept this post open, just to wonder how amazingly off-topic answers keep coming : most of them, sorry to say, seem to have just read the question title, and don't address the most important point of the post under the title, i.e., the possible (UN)DECIDABILITY of the conjecture.

Since this very point did not seem to get interest from anyone, the post is now closed.

WikiTree profile: Eleanor of Aquitaine
closed with the note: Reason explained in the last post edit : too many off-topic answers
in The Tree House by Bernard Vatant G2G6 Pilot (166k points)
closed by Bernard Vatant
Given your interest in Eleanor, you might be interested in https://www.dutchgenealogy.nl/tag/eleanor-of-aquitaine/ ; Yvette Hoitink (a Dutch professional genealogist) is fully proofing her line back to Eleanor using proof arguments! Ofc the virus got in the way for the Belgian / French generations - but once travel is allowed again she'll prolly get going again (she's nearly there).
Thanks Willem, very interesting indeed!
Yes, she is my 27th great grandmother
She's my 28th great grandmother.
And then, "Eleanor of Aquitaine"... So much for "use their conventions, not ours". Ugh.
I don’t understand what you mean by your comment Isabelle.
@Christine, the link to her profile at the bottom of the post displays at "Eleanor of Aquitaine" since this is how her WikiTree profile is set up. But, the name "Eleanor of Aquitaine" reflects how the English speaking world calls her now. It was not her name at birth and it was not how she was called in her lifetime (I believe even in England, the language at Court was French at the time). One of the first rules of profile making in WikiTree is "use their conventions, not ours". It was not respected in "Eleanor"'s case, obviously because the "use their conventions not ours" standard is trumped by the sense of ownership of an Anglo-Saxon community towards this queen of England (and ancestress of Americans).

Exact, Isabelle. Et en fait j'aurais dû lancer ce sujet en Français cheeky

The difficulty with using 'their conventions' with profiles from the 12th century, is that all existing documents from that time period are in Latin.  

Even if we could find documents written in whatever language was being used by the court (which may not have been the same as that spoken by the people they ruled), it would probably be just as difficult to comprehend given the changes in written and probably spoken language over the 800 years since she died.  Not to mention that there were many regional dialects.

The other issue, of course, is that there were no standards for how a name should be spelled, and it could vary depending on who was writing the document, or more accurately in many cases acting as the scribe.

Although I believe we shouldn't automatically write all names in English, given my comments above, developing a suitable naming structure that fits within WikiTree's name fields can be difficult.

Can I also suggest that if you don't like what is currently there that you provide some alternatives that can be discussed.
Yes, she's my 23rd ggrandmother by various lines. I like the idea of having a way to track her descendants since so many people can share. Though when I ran the algorithm it went a route with that is "uncertain" rather than any of the routes that I can be confident in, which is annoying. Is there a way to get the algorithm to give all the routes and not just the first one that pops up?

@John I'm not a medievist as you know and certainly not qualified to change a name that's been here for so long. Her name has been discussed before in G2G (though it as probably a tangent rather than a specific thread about her. It would probably be better for me to move on to other things instead of complaining. Bernard has been actively trying to recruit more French members and Eleanor is exactly the sort of thing that they are likely to find a turn-off. The name the French know her by would probably be a turn-off for non-French however. I'm sorry for having raised this, as I'm not qualified to resolve this dilemma.

Meanwhile this is her seal, and another, of her as Queen of England.

The profile's been changed since this was raised before, and her normal first name is Aliénor now.

But G2G uses the same rules for the profile link as it does for posters.

And if you remove the name Eleanor altogether, searches for that name won't find her.
23rd Great Grandmother also on another 1198 lines, lol.
Yes! Eleanor of Aquitaine is my 25th g grandmother! I think that’s a great idea to have a category and sticker to see all of our relationships to her!
Nobles and royalty intermarried with nobles and royalty and so they all have multiple decents from the kings, queens and nobles of the medieval world.  Common people intermarried with common people generation after generation and seldom the twain did meet. In spite of all the romantic stories of the king or duke's daughter marrying the groomsman or gardener, it almost never happened. Very few people with ordinary average folks with humble backgrounds will find notable ancestors. Pedigree collapse occurs in all classes and groups, which seldom ever interacted.

Daniel, if you look at various answers below and my comments on them, you will see that my point is that beyond fairy tales and dubious royal filiations, there has been in the past more social porosity than one would expect. Not maybe in high aristocracy and royal families, but in France at least, the local petite noblesse had alliances with rich but not necessarily nobles families, fortunes and titles have always flock together in a kind of symbiosis. Nobility could be acquired by a good marriage if the bride or the groom was coming with a convenient amount of land or money, of which nobles were often lacking. I've been studying for one year some of my ancestors in the 1600s in the heart of Britanny, with alliances between such families and local royal civil servants (notaires et procureurs royaux). The no(ta)bility of their (large) descendancy has been slowing eroding during the 18th century, and with the Revolution, most of them (my ancestors) became simple and often very poor illiterate peasants.

See for example the descendancy of Catherine de Kerenor.

Absolutely! My line to her goes through my gg gran, a washerwoman whose husband was an agricultural labourer. But her grandfather had been a yeoman and his grandfather had come from a man of considerable property, and he had a ggg grandmother who came from minor aristocracy, and they were quite closely related to Henry VIII. In Britain, this is not rare at all. I have found this on many trees I've work on for friends and relations. None of them expected to be descended from any royals. But you do have to push back to at least the 1600s for things to open up, and not neglect the female lines.
Now I am feeling jealous because I only have 713 different descents from her!
29th GGM, but nowhere near as many descents as cousin Carolyn Adams.
Look above at what cousin Ed Trowbridge said.  I have a Trowbridge line, (on my dad's side, Carol-- you are on my mom's side), so a lot of those descents are tied up with the Trowbridges.  The royal and noble lines intermarry quite a bit. Not always a good thing.
Hi Cousin Carolyn, I figured that I was on the maternal line. It (the line from Eleanor) our shared maternal line. Take care!

She is my 25 great grandmother with 332 lines between her and myself. 

I tried to download every book that I could find on Alienor through archive.org , but one can only borrow each book for twelve days. 

Since this post has came back to life after one year of dormance, and for those who read French, for what it's worth, my own possible descendancy from Aliénor can be checked on this page, 31 generations, of which 8 are lacking in WikiTree to bridge a two centuries gap between Philippa de Laval (ca.1288 - 1350) and Jean Jégou (ca.1470 - bef. 1534). Having no qualification whatsoever in medieval genealogy, I won't venture in assessing the confidence of the missing links copied from various secondary sources, let alone add them to WikiTree. But if someone has both qualification, will and bandwidth, please proceed!

Hi Bernard, I don't really have time to look at this in depth, but to start with there are some problems with the dates you have on that list.  For instance, line 25 Jeanne de Beaumont-Brienne is older than her father, and line 24 Philippe de Laval, is about 47 when she gives birth to her daughter Blanche de Rochefort, not impossible but unlikely.

Moreri's 'Le grand dictionnaire historique ...' p. 20 although not perhaps ideal as a source, does have line 20 Guyon de La Chapelle as descendant of Ailette de Molac, but doesn't mention a daughter Mabille, unless this is an alternative name for daughter Marie, or Jeanne?  However Moreri has Guyon's son and grandson as Seigneur de Molac, which would make it unlikely that Mabille would be Dame de Molac.  

I wouldn't want to necessarily guarantee any of the lines from 24 to 15, but that relationship from lines 20 to 19 would appear to be the one most at risk.

John, thanks for taking the time to look into that, allowing me to fix dates at least! Jeanne de Brienne birth date was probably a copy-paste mistake, I've changed it to value given by WikiTree (1230 > 1263). Same for Philippa de Laval, (1335 > 1325). 

As for the rest, I agree with your cautious conclusion smiley

Eleanor is my husband's 31st great grandmother.

According to data analysis in "The pear shaped tree", less than 17,000 profiles in WikiTree were born in the 1200s. I've started to count the descendants of Aliénor born in the 1200s, will be interesting to figure which proportion they represent.

She's my 24th great-grandmother on my mother's side, with 100 different paths to get there, including pathways to her on my father's side as well, lol.
24th gg grandson.
I would like to know what is your access to Moreri's le grand Dictionnaire historique....and can I get access to view it online?

thanks for your consideration of my request.
Have no access to what your looking for, she is my 23rd GGM.

60 Answers

+11 votes
 
Best answer

I wrote up a little script to find Eleanor's descendants by birth century (according to WikiTree data dump from 2021-07-18):

Descendants by (birth) century

 *      0     57_518

 *   1100         54

 *   1200        628

 *   1300      1_928

 *   1400      5_445

 *   1500     19_132

 *   1600     42_415

 *   1700    309_437

 *   1800  1_306_600

 *   1900    552_285

 *   2000          8

Total # descendants: 2_295_450

So, 628 / 16,632 (4%) in 1200s. 1,928 / 22,452 (9%) in 1300s. 5,445 / 36,671 (15%) in 1400s. And the later centuries are all surprisingly close to 10% (I would have thought it would increase as you got more recent). (For total numbers compare: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:The_pear_shaped_tree) (Note: birth century 0 means no birth date available.)
by Shawn Ligocki G2G6 Mach 2 (28.7k points)
selected by Bernard Vatant

Thanks Shawn for sharing those interesting figures here. As answered privately, the fact that the proportion is not as high as expected in recent centuries is  certainly linked to the fact that a lot of recent profiles do not track their ascendancy up to the 1200s. It would be interesting to know the proportion of descendants of Aliénor among the profiles who have ascendants up to 1200.

So let's ask also the question the other way round. Who has ascendants up to 1200 and is NOT a descendant of Aliénor? Will add it to the question text.

I agree with Bernard that this is not a surprise. There is a big difference between the recent parts of Wikitree and the parts which are earlier than say 1750.
+17 votes
I always wondered why there is no sticker for people who can trace their tree back to Charlemagne - why not Eleanor of Aquitaine?
by Leigh Murrin G2G6 Mach 3 (35.7k points)
Agreed.
+12 votes
I'd stick to mainland Europe.  On WikiTree, the large majority of descendants will be American and it will all just morph back into the defunct Questionable Gateway Ancestors project.
by Living Horace G2G6 Pilot (625k points)
RJ, not sure I understand. What is this Questionable Gateway Ancestors project? You mean you would work only on the descendants still living in Europe (like my wife, her children, and maybe myself - far from proven ancestry).

That's already a lot of work anyway :-)
English or Scottish royal ancestry is claimed for thousands of colonial immigrants by their optimistic descendants.  Most of those lines were put out without sources cited, but it's impossible to prove that sources never existed.  Many people (including Burke's) continue to believe that family pedigrees and traditions should be taken as authoritative, until proved otherwise.
I don't think this is particular to American people. People here in Europe, at least in France as far as I know, have similar claims, based on thin proofs, often a single book, itself based on family pedigrees.

Seems to me the problem you raised is somehow the same in Europe and over the oceans. That said, if you have no (proven or not) aristocratic ancestry, the chance you can trace any ancestry at all back to the 12th century is faint.
Correction - by millions. There is nothing special about being descended from medieval royalty. The  questionable thing is do they make a badge of honour or are they nasty genocidal maniacs.
Indeed. Whoever your ancestors were, there is nothing to be proud or ashamed of, because you have no responsibilty whatsoever in who they were and what they achieved. You might feel proud or ashamed of your descendants, and even this is questionable. But understanding how your particular family history is linked to the history at large is a motivation of genealogical research which is not that bad.
don't forget all the people from England :)
If you are talking about aristocracy they are an international lot and married for alliances all over France, Germany, the British Isles and low countries. Towns people are another group with weaker international connections. The poor old serf was not allowed to leave his village. There was also a class of slave who had no choice were they ended up.
I'm going to chime in here after reading John Atkinson's and Bernard Vatant's thoughtful posts. While WikiTree has a preponderance of 'Americans', the global nature of the Tree is growing daily. We now have Italian, German, etc. teams who are willing to do translations for those of us Americans who have German, Italian, Polish, etc. ancestry. Plus, we have several people who are working very hard to grow our African, African American and persons who had been born into slavery profiles.

As to 'Eleanor' of Aquitaine, there would be descendants globally as well (e.g., Australia, New Zealand, and other UK countries. Since we are tracing Magna Carta Baron ancestry, why not include 'Eleanor' (at long last a woman for Pete's sake) or Charlemagne. I am one of the many who descends from Charlemagne in a 'proven' line. I worked on FDRs profile last year during the pandemic cleaning up and clarifying the Lawrence-Walton line as FDR descends from the same line. I was in Aachen in 2015 and had this ancestry with me. I met with a genealogist at a local university and he "never thought of American descendants of Charlemagne...only tracing those in Europe"!

So, it's not all Americans who are interested in this past lineage. And hopefully, eventually, with will have other non-European royal ancestry to point to as we add WT members from Asia and elsewhere. Meanwhile, even if there are millions who can 'rightfully as best proven as possible' claim to be descendants of Eleanor or Charlemagne or Edward III, why not? I don't overlook ALL of the ancestors who contributed to my being here, particularly the (Unknown) women who far surpass (Unknown) men, I am pleased to know I descend from two historic figures even if my sole DNA may currently be a non-existent drop in the ocean.

Genealogy is discovery, history and connection. We should celebrate it.
It is of course all fun, but I personally like to celebrate sceptical careful genealogy.

Our Horace is, I think, pointing out how you can save a lot of time in a descent project like this by also looking at the discussions about descents of people related to Alienor.

I was just coming here to say these "are you descended from __?" posts function as a great Spurious Gateway Ancestors detector for me!

In my case, if I see royal ancestry going through anybody other than (confirmed gateway) Peter Worden, I know there's a PGM profile someplace with bogus parents attached and I want to go work on a cleanup.

Crushing my cousins' dreams. Sorry y'all.

Most of Eleanor's lines never got to the Americas.
Bernard, we can indeed feel pride or shame at what our ancestors accomplished or didn't , however, the reason for doing genealogy is to realize how linked we all are, by 27 degrees or less mostly.  I am grateful for the technology within wikitree which allows us to see "relationship to me" making us see connections with "certainty' or "confidence" that doesn't exist on other genealogical sites with unverified sources. I now can go back to my geneanet.org page and add sources from wikitree which gives me more "confidence" of their integrity.
+13 votes
Yup... my 28th great grandmother.  One of the 536,870,912 28th great grandmothers I have. (Assuming no duplications) That is more than the world population when she was alive. After you go back 30 generations, we are also probably all descendants of Myrtle, the wife Delbert the goat herder from Dorking.
by Mr. Fitzgerald G2G6 (7.8k points)

Marc, I feel like a bit of sarcasm in your answer. wink

Of course I'm aware of those figures, and that we are all probable descendants of just anyone living at that time in Europe and who had posterity until today.

So, your point is : so what, who cares? Right?

I had I a smiley face on the reply, but it did not show up.  I am a sarcastic fellow... probably comes from the 3% of my DNA that is Neanderthal. They were a bunch of smart-asses.
Maybe your Neanderthal DNA passed through Aliénor.
537 Million 28th Great Grandmothers, assuming no duplications.  But each one of those alternate paths (I have 270) indicates a duplication and eliminates many of the potential great grandmothers, probably by the factorial of the number of generations to the deviation, or at least by the same doubling factor of the number of generations.  So, assuming my 270 alternate paths average the midpoint 14th generation, i can eliminate almost 9 million duplicates.  And since we know the historical records will always be biased toward the 1% who leave a paper trail, we can assume that reduction is only a fraction of the duplications.  The only reasonable assumption is that the inverse is the real number of potential 28th great grandmothers, 1% of 537 million is 5.4 million, and that is probably still high, but at least it's within the historical population curves...  Just saying from my non-Neanderthal side...
+9 votes
Well, no, she is not.

I guess that makes me an exception ;-)
by Isabelle Martin G2G6 Pilot (561k points)

Isabelle, how do you know she is not? You have tracked all your ancestors back to 1200?

I would have said the same for myself a few months ago before I stumbled upon Ollivier Jégou de Kervilio. A single unexpected ancestor can change the game ...

I haven't. I have strictly no noble ancestors. Absolutely none, not even close, every where I could look, which means all my lines dead-end around 1600 (usually later than that).

My reasoning is that if I can't prove a line that goes back to her (no chance), then there is none. I'm a mathematician, after all.

Edited to add: besides, if I have no nobles between 1600 and 1999, why should I imagine there would be some between 1200 and 1600? There was even less class mobility then than there is now.
Isabelle, that's what I thought (I edited my answer while you wrote yours, sorry), but I discovered, in the heart of Brittany, more class porosity before 1700 than after. There has been at all times a lot of children, if not legitimate, at least acknowledged and supported by their noble parents. Between 1200 and 1600, there are hundreds of thousands of such opportunities. Bear in mind that you have a lot more ancestors between 1200 and 1600 than since 1600!
There was always downward mobility.  In England, Eleanor was the mother of king John, who sired a string of bastards.  John's 2nd son, Richard, had a few more.  That's just the ones we know about.

Five of them are in the book as ancestors of gateway immigrants, though the connections aren't above dispute.  They're the lines that had enough property to be traceable.

But the money didn't spread that far, and there's no telling how many younger sons and grandchildren don't appear in records, at least, none that would tell us who they were.  Contrary to what the internet thinks, they didn't take the surname Plantagenet.
Yes indeed! I'm currently having a detailed look at the descendants of my bastard of ancestor Guillaume Jégou, born in the early 1600's, probable father being the above quoted Ollivier. His marriage and posterity shows he's not kicked off suddenly from his noble extraction, it takes about three generations of fortune erosion, so to speak. But at the eve of French Revolution, all his descendants seem to be simple peasants. This is work in progress, but would give good example of how noble ancestry can slowly drift into oblivion of downstream generations. And of course, being bastard branches, they are also deliberately forgotten by official pedigrees of noble families!
There is no possibility of any Ollivier Jégou in my ancestry. I am sure I am not a descendant of Aliénor.

I'll grant you that I am a descendant of Charlemagne - with 18.5% of my ancestors being from the area of Chaumont-en-Vexin, at the border between the old Kingdom of France and the Duchy of Normandy and the site of much fighting, there is a significant chance that some of my remote ancestors were the product of rape either by the local or enemy lords. Unprovable, of course, and as such it doesn't count. But Aliénor? No way. Much too recent!

As a WikiTreer without either noble or migrating ancestors (my ancestors migrated from Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland to France - on WikiTree, that doesn't count) I am an exception in that only 4 or 5 members (of whom I think only 1 or 2 are active) are my blood relations. Please do not tantalize me about being an Aliénor descendant when I know it will never show on my tree.

With all that said, Aliénor was a formidable woman and I wish I could count her among my ancestors. But then again, no, she's no ancestress of mine.

Isabelle, let's agree to disagree here. I'lI follow-up privately and in French.wink

Isabelle, I see you have a Swiss great-grand-père with no ancestry, who knows what ancestors lurk in Swiss history awaiting you!

I know, Jessica. Nothing. I have seen unsourced trees. Nothing out of the ordinary there.
+9 votes
I hadn't heard of her, but according to relationship finder, she is my 28xg grandmother. Love relationship finder! Thank you. And I don't think it necessary to give stickers to ancestors of her.

I think a more interesting and useful tool, would be to create a search, which allows anyone to find all the closest notables to their profile.
by Ben Molesworth G2G6 Pilot (161k points)
Now that you have been introduced, go read about her life, she was really a character!
Very interesting story. Thank you.
+7 votes
My 26th great grandmother.
by Carolyn Adams G2G6 Mach 9 (90.8k points)
+9 votes

Probably.

I have an article by a reputable genealogist (NORTH WEST KENT FAMILY HISTORY September 1986 Vo14 No 3 "The Diversions of a Genealogist" by Geoffrey B Barrow) traces the descent from Edward I to our shared Batticombe ancestor.

"Among the children of Edward I and his Queen Eleanor, daughter of Ferdinand III of Castile and Leon, are the Princess Elizabeth Plantaganet, ....

The Princess Elizabeth died in 1316 and had married Humphrey De Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex, ... . Their daughter Margaret was the wife of Hugh Courtenay, 2nd Earl of Devon (d.1377). From both their children, Sir Philip Courtenay of Powderham, and Margaret wife of John, 3rd Lord Cobham, as well as from Sir Thomas Courtenay, Hugh's younger brother, the descent may be traced to two West Country families.

From Margaret Courtenay descent is through Cobham and their eventual heirs the Brookes (all of whom are so magnificently commemorated in the unique series of brasses at Cobham, Kent) to Lucy Brooke who married Nicholas Towse of Swell, Somerset. Their grand-daughter Mary Towse was the wife of Robert Battiscombe of Vere's Wotton, Dorset (d.1628)."

Mary Towse and Robert Battiscombe are my 10th grandparents,and the rest of the descent is on Wikitree already.

At some point I will work on filling in the gaps and finding dates and sources.

The Battiscombes were "landed gentry", and have records back to the early 1400s, but they were not "nobility".

by Janet Gunn G2G6 Pilot (157k points)
edited by Janet Gunn

Hello Janet, thanks for your input.

We have indeed in WT so far the descendancy of Aliénor you mention down to Margaret de Bohun.

If you are in position to fill the gaps down to Mary Towse and Robert Battiscombe, please go ahead!

WT has the descent through to Joan (Baybrooke) Brooke, but doesn't show Lucy Brooke.  So I will have to figure out WHICH of the Brooke branches she belongs on.

Joan (Braybrooke) had 15 kids, but we're already at the level where the younger sons and daughters are disappearing below the genealogical radar.

No telling how many traceable descendants she might have who don't have a clue, and how many more descendants she might have who are not traceable.  And without any bastards in this line.
+8 votes
25th GGM married to King Henry II Curtmantle Plantagenet.  I seem to have descended from all of the Plantagenet Kings.
by

Mary, good for you. See Jessica's answer below.wink

 I'm looking forward to hear about descendants of Aliénor's daughters. She had five sons, and five daughters, the latter having descendancy throughout Europe. So, I would gladly rephrase my question : Do you have a daughter of Aliénor among your ancestors?The more so that there is an overwhelming majority of women who have answered so far.smiley

Nope, Her son, King John was my ancestor, then King Henry, Then two more sons through different lines, King Edward (Longshanks) & Edmund (Crouchback), then King Edward II, etc, etc.

Henry II "Curtmantle", king of England is my 24th great grandfather and maternal second great uncle's 18th great grandfather. My relationship with the Plantagenets ends with Edward I. 

I recently found I am a direct descendant of the first Duke of Norfolk who completes my relationship with the latter Plantagenets

House of Howard  (link)

The answer is Yep, not Nope.  The two wives of Longshanks, the wife of his brother Edmund and the wives of Edward II and Edward III were all descended from Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II through their daughter Eleanor, Queen of Castile.
True!  I noticed that last night & thought maybe I had mad a mistake & should look at that today!  Now that you've cleared that up, it's one less thing to be confused about!  These people make quite a game of keeping us on our toes!
+9 votes

Her son King John was the sort of man who could spit in a petri dish and start a whole new civilization.

However, I find there's an overemphasis on titled ancestors on Wikitree -- "I'm descended from this Plantagenet and this Capet and this Romanov" not to mention all the Clan chiefs -- well, what about my ancestor, Blanche ye milkmaid?

by Jessica Key G2G6 Pilot (310k points)

I agree. I'm one of the numerous descendants of Joannes "Seniori Jubilarius" De Bruijne. But, who cares?

I'm being a bit cheeky, but there is a part of me that resents the hyperfixation on royal lines. On the one hand, yes, they're better documented and they're interesting because you get to learn more about that particular subset of ancestors. On the other hand, there's a faint whiff of something classist about the way genealogists hyperfixate on this subset of ancestors. Royalty were not fae folk or something, they were nothing more than history's most successful robber barons.

Indeed, Jessica! But practically, who is able to track a single of her ancestors back in the 12th century who was not somehow "notable", hence somehow linked to aristocracy? I have 99% of Blanche ye milkmaid (or their equivalent in Bretagne) in my ancestors, but when I'm finished with the civil records (after 1792), and the parish records (from ca.1600 to 1792), there is not much I can find to track their lineage further back in time. The only chance I have to go further back is to grab a documented family, read : some kind of aristocracy.

And, please note, I've chosen a woman. OK she married two kings, and BTW I see here only descendants of the British marriage, looking forward for descendants of her posterity in France, Spain, etc.
In Victorian England, it was very simple.  The landowners were the people who ought to be running the country, because they owned the land.  They owned it because the Conqueror gave it to their ancestors, and it was their property, period.  They didn't need to be fearless warriors themselves, or have any talent or anything.

But in America, they thought they'd done away with the hereditary right to rule (how socialist), and yet power still seemed to run in families.  Since it was an article of faith that the lawyers, bankers and politicians were in their positions by their personal merits, they had to believe that the personal merits ran in families.  They thought the noble qualities of the powerful could be traced in their ancestors.

As for Blanche ye milkmaid, she clearly didn't have the sort of noble qualities that could do anybody any good.

Bernard, I might come across as being critical of you, but I certainly don't mean you any harm. I like to add a little levity to G2G, and also I like to ask questions and challenge people's preconceived notions. There are notions or precepts commonly found in genealogy as a hobby that include: the point of genealogy is to find a connection to royalty; being descended from royalty is inherently 'better' and may even mean that you are 'better' than other people; etc.

In college I majored in medieval history, specifically the Fourth Crusade, so by no means do I believe history, including medieval history, is not worthwhile or that we should ignore the exploits of royalty. I just want us to question some of these precepts of genealogy.

Jessica, I think we are 100% d'accord.

The way I question those precepts, as you call them, is maybe not obvious, so let me expand a little how I came there.

Until recently, I thought 100% of my ancestors from my grandparents upwards were obscure, mostly illiterate workers and peasants, marrying the girl next door, most of the time some kind of cousin. Noble families were people we read about in history books, sanguinary lords sucking the marrow of the bones of us poor honest working people, raping our daughters, sending our sons to death in stupid wars etc etc.

I happened to meet and eventually marry a descendant of a French noble family. Nowadays, as I learnt from her, this can be more a burden than anything else. Either you stick to the aristocratic tradition, which is still today alive and well two centuries after the Revolution, you play by the rules, marry another "de" etc, or you throw away everything and run for your life. I'll let you guess what she chose.

It has been of course and endless subject between us, the peasant and the dame de. When we started to get involved a bit seriously in genealogy, I looked into her ancestors, and she looked into mine. And it appeared than the more you look at things, the more you follow branches, and the less clear those things become. The division of society we had both learnt at home and at school does not resist a closer look at families history.

And we eventually discovered that both of us could claim, (tongue in cheek for me), Aliénor d'Aquitaine as ancestor. And if we are, but just anyone can be.

We have certainly in the 12th century a lot more obscure common ancestors, of whom we'll unfortunately never know anything but the fact that they existed. The reasons to chose Aliénor is, as said, not her royalty, but her position in genealogical time an space, and the way her descendants spread all over Europe in a few generations. And how modern she was, by so many aspects. Kings and their wars are boring. Aliénor was a fascinating woman, and the idea that she could be the greatgrandmother of so many of us is also fascinating.

Bernard, it's definitely a "let's agree to disagree" thing. I've never found one instance of my ancestors mingling with aristocracy. Not until the 1990s. I think the closer we got was when the brother of one of the wives of an ancestor worked as a gardener on one of the properties of the Prince of Conti. Mind that by your standards I'm not even connected to the wife in question, since she is not my ancestress, having promptly died in childbirth. We did have some social mobility - for instance my great-great grandmother, the daughter of a dirt poor Belgian immigrant who did all kinds of odd repulsive jobs, and who herself started as an humble seamstress with a child out of wedlock - ended up the wife of a prosperous baker with several houses in Lille. Another ancestor was a local greffier de justice and his son and grandson were fermier-receveurs; I'm a descendant of the younger grandson and they became simple day workers in two generations. But contact with aristocracy, nope.

So I've come to believe that this "everyone has a beggar and a prince in their ancestry" is a cliché and nothing more. 

+9 votes

She could have been my step-grandmother, but sadly not biologically, no, lol. Henry II is my 28th great-grandfather but by way of his son William Longespée whose mother was one of Henry II's mistresses, Ida le Bigodsmiley

by Katie Taylor G2G6 (9.8k points)

Nice try, Katie smiley

I think if all of our ancestors exercised a little more personal restraint it'd make all our efforts a lot easier. But then where would most of us be? Literally. laugh

Not sure I get your point, Katie.
Meaning, if our ancestors had managed to limit their extramarital excursions (not had affairs), it would make tracing and verifying lineages much simpler.
Sure, but much less fun!
Indeed! And many, like myself, wouldn't be here to chuckle over their escapades. :)
+5 votes
Eleonor of Aquitaine is my 28th Great Grandmother on my Mother's side.
by Angela Cortner G2G5 (5.6k points)
+5 votes
She's my 24th GGM on my father's side.
by Carol Baldwin G2G Astronaut (1.1m points)
+4 votes

Well, if somebody can trace my 11th great-grandfather Nicolaes Cauchort (or Cochois) back to Alienor it would be fun. Or any of the wives in this family while they still married within the Walloon/French community.

Cauchort is said to have come to Sweden in 1623 as a charcoal maker for the iron industry. I have seen it stated that he probably came from Sedan - and since this area was a refuge for Huguenots these people may have had roots from all over France. As far as I know his family has not been traced back before arrival in Sweden.

by Eva Ekeblad G2G6 Pilot (565k points)
+4 votes

According to Geni.com Eleanor d'Aquitaine, Queen Consort Of England is my paternal 24th great grandmother.

Also my maternal second great uncle's 19th great grandmother.

by Anonymous Whiting G2G6 (9.4k points)
+4 votes
Visited the Abbey of Fontevraud last week which renewed my interest in Aliénor d'Aquitaine. I was really impressed by Yvette Hoitink's research and thought I will have a go at finding my connection to Aliénor and then try to prove it like Yvette is doing. Well, she turns out to be my 25th great grandmother and the proof looks pretty good so far. Not very original but still fun to work on and use as a way to learn about history.
by Remko Stift G2G6 Mach 2 (24.3k points)
+4 votes
She is my 24th great grandmother with 8 different paths
by Jennifer Robins G2G6 Pilot (248k points)
+4 votes

"79 different paths were found between Aliénor and Sarah" wink

by Sarah Mason G2G6 Mach 5 (56.5k points)
+5 votes
She is my 22nd great grandmother with 1,805 paths (to date).
by Roger Stong G2G Astronaut (1.3m points)
+3 votes
Queen Alienor is 25 degrees away (24th great grandmother) through her son the much maligned, in my opinion, King John  Plantagenet my 23rd great grandfather and her second husband King Henry II (24th great grandfather).
by Malc Rowlands G2G6 Mach 4 (48.2k points)

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