Comments on Herbert (Maine) du Maine

Question

On 22 Sep 2020 Tamara Killian wrote on Maine-30:

Help! Totally confused! This profile, Herbert Maine-30, has a daughter Paula Maine-34, who has mother listed as Bertha Blois-16. BUT Blois-16 is listed as wife of Hugues IV Maine-128, SON of this profile Maine-30. THAT WOULD MEAN BERTHA HAD A CHILD WITH HER FATHER-IN-LAW, CORRECT???

Answer 1

Your confusion is the result of a confusion in the original sources (in particular, the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, written in the early 1100s, which is our principal primary source). There is a detailed discussion at the Henry Project (which is now located at https://fasg.org/projects/henryproject/data/paula000.htm); this discussion was written by Stewart Baldwin, a very well-respected medieval genealogist. The Henry Project comes to the conclusion that we cannot reliably determine who Paula's parents were. Two other medieval genealogy sites with somewhat less rigor (Cawley's Medieval Lands and the late Leo de Pas' Genealogics) have Paula as the daughter of your Herbert Maine and an unknown wife (though Cawley also notes some caveats).

It is unfortunate that Wikitree shows such a confused genealogy - it definitely requires cleaning up. Until Wikitree is cleaned up, you may be better served by looking at one of the three sources referenced above for this section of medieval genealogy.

Comments

Thank you so much for fast and informative response!

Answer 2

I've added tags for France, Medieval, Pre-1500, and Euroaristo to your post to bring it to the attention of project members.  Without these tags, your post will tend to go unnoticed unless someone stumbles across it.  Please keep these tags in mind for future posts that would fall within the scope of any of these projects.  Thanks.

After reading C-H's post, I am going to go in and detach parents and add C-H's note in the biography.