Question

How could i be directly related to almost all of the suerties in the 24 25 or 26th degree? Are we all?.

Comments

I'm pretty new here and still entering recent ancestors, being very meticulous about sources.  Such a vast landscape of history has opened up to me - direct Mayflower descendant, relative of President Thomas Jefferson.  I've just scratched the surface.  Now, just having checked five or six of these Magna Carta signers and finding a direct descent from every one of them to my children, I see that I have a lot of hard work ahead of me.  Thanks.  Will be following this.

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If I recall, they were all, or almost all, related by blood, so if you have a definitive line to one, then there's no reason not to be related to most of the others. The catch is making sure that line is solid.

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Please keep in mind that "related" is different from "descended."  The Magna Carta baron with the fewest direct descendants seems to have been William de Lanvallei.

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Apparently Monica is right.  I've now checked all fifteen of the Surety Barons listed on the Relationship Finder quick links, and my children are directly descended from all of them, 26th - 29th Great grand children of them, including Lanvallei.  But as Monica says, my task now is to comb through the line to see if each link in the chain is solid or if some are wishful and speculative, as I've found in many cases on Family Search.

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Okay, I've checked some of these and many of them connect through a badged Gateway Ancestor (Henry Norwood in the majority of cases). Looking at the Magna Carta Base Camp page, I assume that means I don't have to check the ancestors back from Henry Norwood to Henry de Bohun--that I can trust that 'Trail'? But I'm further assuming that if I want to 'prove' a connection from Henry Norwood to another of the handful that are his ancestors who were Surety Barons I'd have to do the work myself.  And I'm assuming that I'm on my own as I follow the Trail in the other direction from Henry Norwood down to the present.  Am I making good assumptions?  Any recommendations?

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Thanks for checking that, Peter :)

I'm pretty sure being related by blood invariably means having common ancestors.

Just out of curiosity, I ran a 30-gen descendant list in my own database for Lanvallei and the list ran to 377 pages. Very few of them run through the US as my lines are British and don't include many emigrants. Because Richardson's book focuses on America, it's easy to overlook the fact that there will be far more contemporary English descendants than American ones.

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Peter, I looked up Henry Norwood, and he lived in the thick of very interesting times!  I'm descended from the "other side," Samuel Mathews (Sr. and Jr.), who were leaders in the Commonwealth faction that came to power after Virginia submitted to Parliament and Norwood returned to England.

Anyway, regarding various Magna Carta descents for Henry Norwood, I'll suggest, first of all:  do a google search with the words Henry Norwood Magna Carta Ancestry.  That should bring up a link to Douglas Richardson's treatment of Henry Norwood in "Magna Carta Ancestry," which is freely available online.  (Selected snippets are available, including Norwood's ancestry going back to Bohun.) 

If you go there you will find, if you scroll up a bit, that Richardson includes a lineage from Norwood's mother to Magna Carta baron William Malet.  But that lineage isn't available in the online snippets from Richardson's book, and there are doubtless many other lineages in "Magna Carta Ancestry" that have been thoroughly researched.  (And if you wanted to improve the profiles for those lineages, they could eventually be badged like the well-established and Magna-Carta-Project-approved Norwood lineage to Bohun.)  (And keep in mind, Richardson's more recent "Royal Ancestry" sometimes includes corrections and additional information not contained in "Magna Carta Ancestry.")

Richardson does NOT include lineages through the mother of Henry Norwood's grandfather William Norwood.  Maybe he felt unsure about that Throckmorton ancestry; see this old SGM post: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/GEN-MEDIEVAL/2013-08/1376548718

I can't access the responses to that post, but maybe that line has been firmed up since then; there's something for you to check further if you have the time and inclination.  Right now the Throckmorton connection is shown on wikitree as a certain lineage, and there seem to be Magna Carta lines back there that Richardson didn't include. (?!?!)

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If history of Britain is known, royal blood is kept “all in the family. The Magna Carta was basically all family. Two are my great grandfathers, and the rest are cousins.

Answer 1

Hi Gloria, there is a lot of false medieval information on WikiTree.  The vast majority of descents from Magna Carta ancestors in the relationship finder is false. You can read more about that at this old thread:  "Epidemic of false medieval ancestries for colonial immigrants."

 However, occasionally we stumble over a lineage that might be real, as well as the 200 or so known "gateway ancestors."  Then there is a larger mass of "questionable gateway ancestors" that needs to be sorted through and mostly discarded.

You could help with this, by using the relationship finder and finding the ancestor in each lineage who emigrated from England.  If this ancestor is not tagged with either the category "gateway ancestors" or the category "prospective gateway ancestors" or the category "questionable gateway ancestors," then he or she should be added to the "questionable gateway ancestors" to be reviewed when your hard-working Magna Carta Project coordinators who do that type of thing get around to it.  I usually bump special requests to the top of the list. :-)

You can add someone to the category of "questionable gateway ancestors" by copying and pasting the following at the very top of someone's profile:

[[Category:Questionable_Gateway_Ancestors]]

Answer 2

Chances are you might not be. Some trees tend to be messed up with the wrong parents. The only way you can know for sure is by research or by checking out this list of immigrants with proven ties to the suerties.

Here's the link: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Gateway_Ancestors

That gives you a list of gateway ancestors. Some may be there linking to the sureties. There are also other paths, it seems. You just need to research.

Answer 3

If you have an ancestor who is a gateway into the highest level of the British aristocracy more recently than say 1500 then it is very possible, but I have the impression it is much less common than for example being a descendant of Edward III.

Answer 4

I don't see why not. They are all my 23rd to 25th great grandfathers except one who is a distant uncle. Perhaps we are related.