Up a Tree

One of the things I'm going to need to learn to do is to pay better attention to the exact lineage of the people I find in my past so I can track them down again. I found Sir John de Greystoke last week, prompting the post about coats of arms and heraldry, and I know that he was an ancestor of Orpha Morse, who in turn is an ancestor of my grandmother. For the life of me, though, I could not trace back from Orpha to John this week. I need to do this because part of my quest is to understand exactly how I could have so many members of the English peerage, and possibly royalty, whose stories flow down to a poor Chicago resident begging members of Congress and the military for enough money to be able to feed her family.  At some point, some offspring of one of the peers did not succeed to the title, and his or hers heirs went on to become "regular" people, like Matthew Crawley in Downtown Abbey, who at the opening of the story is a solicitor and most assuredly not a posh memb...