Up a Tree

Governments bring bureaucracy wherever they arise. In the Old Testament God warned the Israelites after they clamored for a king so they could be like the other nations (that kind of reasoning almost never being good). They'd have to have armies, which would require something like a draft, and would require taxes to fund the armies, which would require more taxes to fund the government, which would ... well, you get the point. Oh, and you have to have information, lots of information. Take William the conqueror, for example. William I, king of Normandy, set his sights on England, and in 1066, England's reigning king, Edward the Confessor, died, giving William a chance to fill the vacuum. Of course no shortage of Englishmen wanted the spot, so William had to bring his armed forces over to make sure he sat on the throne.  He was sort of closely related to the previous king, so he had sort of a claim to it. Never mind that Edward had already decided who his successor should be. W...

I mentioned that one branch of  Sharon's part of the family tree extends back to 10th century England and ends with a fella named Orm son of Gamal. Because he shares a first name with that of the Viking Orm, who legendarily tossed his severed leg onto the shore of Scotland to become the leader of the Viking settlement there, I thought that perhaps he was a descendant of the legend.  That is wishful thinking because we have no good records that link Orm the Viking with Orm son of Gamal. And standard last names weren't in wide use at the time of his birth Perhaps his parents simply chose to honor the legend by naming their child for him.  While investigating to find a link, I discovered an annoying complication. Finding an Orm son of Gamel in history isn't all that complicated, I found that our Orm may be the same person as Orm Gamalson, who had a son he named Gamal, after his father. This son is often referred to as Gamal Ormson through the creation of last names using the...

I've grown tired of running down forebears that turn out to not actually be part of the family, though I am grateful for the history I learned along the way (which, after all, is supposed to be the point of these posts). So I turned back to Sharon's side of the family, again climbing the branches of her mother's side of the tree. Along the way, I ran into the Ormsby family, whose lineage extended far into England's past -- so far that I decided to run it back as far as I could go.  At the end of the line was a fellow referred to as Orm son of Gamel. His birth is listed as being in the 10th century and his death  in the 11th before the Norman invasion, though the dates listed were approximations. His listing contained one attachment, a line drawing of a book titled The Domesday Book. We'll discuss the Domesday Book in a subsequent post, probably not the next one but the one after that - two weeks if I manage to exercise some discipline. For now, know that the book ha...

Near the close of the 15th century, John de Vere made his appearance to the world at Castle Hedingham in Essex, England, the only surviving son of George de Vere, son of 12th Earl of Oxford. He appears too far back in my family tree to show a relationship, but he does show up in the direct line of succession. His father had been destined for the priesthood, and George's grandfather gave him a benefice -- an appointment to a church that involved property and an income for his pastoral services. But George's father and his eldest son were gruesonely executed in 1462, convicted of treason against the king, Edward IV, for aligning themselves with forces opposed to the king. Never a good idea in the Middle Ages. Edward took the high road and granted George's older brother, also named John, the title and lands that formerly belonged to their father. John, the 13th Earl, managed to get himself into several scrapes with the king, but survived and became a favorite of the Tudors whe...

Sir John de Montagu, 3rd Earl of Salisbury and 2nd Baron Montagu, appeared in my family tree with an intriguing note attached: "[H]is head was sent to King Henry IV at Oxford, and was set on London Bridge. His body was buried at Cirencester Abbey, but his widow was allowed by Henry V to remove it to Bisham Priory, Berkshire, of which he was the hereditary patron." No information shared exactly how he lost his head, so I immediately began looking on the 'Net to find out who he was and how he came to such a horrible end. Like many in the peerage he came by his title the old-fashioned way, by inheriting it.  The sources I looked at concentrated firstly on his heritage and then jumped to his life as an adult. He served in the military and made a name for himself in a war against France, where he picked up a knighthood. [1] He joined Parliament in 1391 and managed to become a favorite of King Richard II, one of the kings Shakespeare wrote a play about, mostly because Will thou...

We looked the last couple of times at the fella, Samuel F.B. Morse, who's credited with the invention of the telegraph and how that leap in communication came about. We looked at Morse because he's listed as one of Sharon's ancestors in Family Search, although he's a distant cousin. I'm reading a book about another famous invention and the men behind it, and I wondered whether I could find a putative relationship with them as well. I won't mention the invention or the inventors here because they're not really the point of this post, but I found that Sharon is (probably) related to them in another one of those distant-cousin ways -- something like a seventh cousin four times removed.  Over the months and years I've been delving into history through the gimmick of our family tree, I've managed to run across a number of distant relations who are either involved in significant events in American and British history or who are famous enough for most peopl...

Sharon's distant cousin, Samuel F.B. Morse, began his early adult life trying to be a professional artist, but most people know little about this phase of his life. Instead they think of him as the inventor of the telegraph.  Now there's a sense in which this invention, combined with the telephone, led us to this modern day in which we carry a device about in our hands so we need never be out of touch if we don't want to be. I may never be able to entirely forgive him for this.  Like many creative people, Morse's interests were wide, as I mentioned in the last post.. Among those interests was electricity. But a couple of events occurred in his life that caused him to take up the study of electricity in earnest -- a death and a chance encounter. As I mentioned last time, at one point Morse was an itinerant portraitist. While away from home doing one such commissioned portrait, his wife, who was pregnant with their third child, gave birth and subsequently died from compli...