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Frequently Asked Questions for soc.genealogy.medievalSummary:This regular posting contains a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and their answers about medieval genealogy. It should be read by anyone who wishes to post to the soc.genealogy.medieval newsgroup or to the associated mailing list, GEN-MEDIEVAL. The FAQ is currently available on the World Wide Web at http://www.erols.com/wrei/faqs/medieval.html. If you have any comments or additions or would like to suggest further topics to be included, then please contact William Addams Reitwiesner (wrei@erols.com).
Copyright:Copyright (c) 1998 by William Addams Reitwiesner. All rights reserved. This document may be freely redistributed in its entirety without modification provided that this copyright notice is not removed. It may not be sold for profit or incorporated in commercial documents (e.g. published for sale on CD-ROM, floppy disks, books, magazines or other print form) without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Permission is expressly granted for this document to be made available for file transfer from installations offering unrestricted anonymous file transfer on the Internet. If this document is incorporated in a commercial document, a complimentary copy should be sent to William Addams Reitwiesner (wrei@erols.com). This document is provided AS IS without any express or implied warranty.
Questions Discussed:
1. What is soc.genealogy.medieval?soc.genealogy.medieval is an unmoderated newsgroup for the discussion of genealogy and family history among people researching individuals who lived in medieval times. The primary focus of the group is likely to be on Europe and neighboring regions, but postings about genealogy in other areas during this time period are welcomed. The mailing list associated with the soc.genealogy.medieval newsgroup is GEN-MEDIEVAL. The newsgroup and mailing list are gated, i.e., all email sent to the mailing list also appears as a posting in the newsgroup, and all postings in the newsgroup (except those that originated with the mailing list) are emailed to the mailing list. See question 2 for information about subscribing to the mailing list. All who have access to soc.genealogy.medieval or GEN-MEDIEVAL and are interested in genealogy in the medieval period are are welcome to participate. Scope of the GroupThe medieval period is loosely defined for the purposes of this group as the period extending from the breakup of the (Western) Roman Empire until the time public records (such as church, tax, and census records) relating to the general population began to be kept. This period would extend roughly from AD 500 to AD 1600, but these limits are not intended to exclude related topics of discussion lying outside of these boundaries, e.g., royal or noble genealogy in earlier or later time periods. A related newsgroup is alt.talk.royalty., and questions relating solely to royal genealogy after about AD 1600 would probably be better raised there. The scope of the group reflects the different nature of genealogical research in the medieval period. Vital records and census records are not available for this period, and the researcher must rely instead on records of inheritance of property or tenancy, heraldic visitations, monastic charters, chronicles, onomastic evidence, and even numismatic evidence. The group is intended to address all these various facets. The group is open to anyone with an interest in genealogy in the time period in question, including, but not limited to:
Inappropriate Topics and Posts:
We highly recommend "lurking"--reading messages without posting anything--for a bit so you can get an idea of how people typically phrase their postings and how to formulate good questions or comments. In other words, "Lurk before you leap."
2. How do I send messages to, subscribe to, unsubscribe from, or search GEN-MEDIEVAL?
To subscribe to GEN-MEDIEVAL, send the following message: To: GEN-MEDIEVAL-L-request@RootsWeb.com
To unsubscribe, send the following message to the appropriate request address: [Message:] unsubscribe When subscribing or unsubscribing, do not include any additional text
or signature. The SmartList software is picky about .sig lines.
Similarly, there is no NOMAIL mode. To stop receiving messages from
GEN-MEDIEVAL for a while, you must unsubscribe and then later resubscribe.
This will search all 1997 digests of postings archived at RootsWeb.
You will get back a message with items like the following in it: To retrieve the digests containing these messages, send the following
to the digest request address GEN-MEDIEVAL-D-request@RootsWeb.com:
Llywelyn appears in lines 18 and 50 of 1997 digest 14 and in lines 590, 599, and 602 of 1997 digest 2. Alternatively, you can search and retrieve individual messages.
To search up to 8000 recent individual messages, send the following to
the non-digest request address GEN-MEDIEVAL-L-request@RootsWeb.com:
Note that searching is case-sensitive. More detailed information about searching is available at Alternatively, the archives of the mailing list (which is gated with the newsgroup) can be searched at RootsWeb, as described in the following excerpt of a recent message from Brian Leverich: ONLINE: THE NEW SEARCH ENGINE SERVER The new search engine server is now online and can operate at the speed of a full T1 connection. Courtesy of hacks by Karen Isaacson, you can search the archives of any mailing list (except those withdrawn by the listowner), now with nicer *formats* and *updated* to within the last 24 hours, at:
3. Basic newsgroup and mailing list "Netiquette"The netiquette for all newgroups in the soc.genealogy hierarchy is essentially the same. We recommend you read the FAQ Basic Newsgroup and Mailing List "Netiquette" for further details. It is posted periodically to soc.genealogy.medieval. One important etiquette issue is how to respond to soc.genealogy.medieval or GEN-MEDIEVAL messages. Before you send off a reply, stop and ask yourself "Who should see this reply?" If the reply is intended for the poster of the original message only, be sure it is sent just to that person and not to the group or list. If you are replying to a message from GEN-MEDIEVAL:
If you are replying to a message in soc.genealogy.medieval, your newsreader should give you a choice of responding to the author or responding to the group. If you want to respond to the group and the message has been cross-posted to several groups, remove any irrelevant groups from the Newsgroups: list (and the Followup-To: list, if any); if the message has no genealogical content, remove soc.genealogy.medieval. Note that very few messages are appropriate for cross-posting. Unsolicited commercial (junk) email or postings are a problem for which there is currently no ideal solution. Probably the best strategy at present is to delete and then forget about them; for messages sent to the GEN-MEDIEVAL list, responding to the author(s) and asking to be removed from their list may actually give them a new email address and thus may result in your getting more rather than less junk mail in the future. Some mailing lists deal with junk mail by having a moderated list or accepting messages only from list members. That is not an option for GEN-MEDIEVAL, since it is gated with the newsgroup soc.genealogy.medieval, i.e., all messages posted to the newsgroup are passed on to the list and all messages sent to the list are posted in the newsgroup. Other etiquette rules we wish to emphasize or that are unique for medieval posts:
One last point to remember concerning inappropriate behavior: our newsgroup, in common with other newsgroups, has its share of people who seek to disrupt the group collectively and/or its posters individually. While we may not have an official policy as to how one should deal with such disruptive behavior, we can suggest the following: DNFTEC. This stands for "Do Not Feed The Energy Creature". An energy creature's favorite feeding tactic is to try to hurt people's feelings or get them angry. The Energy Creature can then feed off the pain and anger it has generated. Its second favorite tactic is to hurt one person or the group's feelings while gathering the sympathy of others. That way, when the injured party lashes back, others will jump to the Energy Creature's defense. The Energy Creature feeds off the attention and the negative energy generated by the people fighting. Newsgroups will never be completely rid of such obnoxious, offensive and ill-mannered beings, but much can be done to keep the situation under control by remembering this simple formula: DNFTEC. If the Energy Creature gets a response, it gets stronger. If it is ignored, it will eventually weaken, wither and go away. Remember: do not to feed the energy creatures.
4. Are there on-line sources of information?If you are using the World Wide Web (aka WWW, W3, Mosaic, Netscape, Lynx), you can reach several pages related to medieval lineages. We do not vouch for their contents. Their URLs:
Some general genealogical pages have links to medieval compilations such as the above, including:
5. How do I start tracing medieval ancestors?To trace genealogical connections, step by step, generation by generation, for a thousand years or more is not a trivial task. For those of you with ancestors in 17th-century America: a quick look for immigrant ancestors with noble or royal ancestry is often the fastest way to acquire a long pedigree. Three books provide a good starting point:
For those of you with ancestors in Britain (from the medieval period up to the present): a good starting point is the set of three indices to pedigrees in printed works and periodicals:
The books in the first group above and most of the books or articles referenced in the indices in the second group above are *secondary* sources that give the author's opinion of what he found in *primary* sources, which include:
You may want to draw your own conclusions by studying the primary sources first hand, which is recommended because none of these books (nor any other) is error-free. Primary sources vary in quality, accuracy, and completeness, too. So how can you determine what sources are best/most accurate? By checking recent genealogical publications and discussing it here in soc.genealogy.medieval. The more you learn, the better you'll be able to draw your own conclusions about accuracy and quality of source material. Prepare for doing the genealogy by reading up on the history, geography, and languages of time and place you intend to research; what you remember (or think you remember) from school is almost certain to be inadequate. Here are some of the secondary sources which have been cited with some regularity by the participants in soc.genealogy.medieval:
The soc.genealogy.medieval newsgroup does not have an official position on any source. Individual participants can and do have strong views on the quality of the information presented in these and other sources.
6. What are the chances that I have royal ancestry?In The Royal Descents of 500 Immigrants, Roberts includes almost 350 colonial American immigrants with royal ancestry. These immigrants (pp. xiv, ff.):
Of these 350 immigrants, 167 left ten or more descendants treated in the Dictionary of American Biography. In the New England Historic Genealogical Society newsletter NEXUS, June-September 1994, Roberts says (p. 104) that 100 million is very likely quite a conservative estimate of the number of American descendants of these 167. [Similar information is needed for other countries. Volunteers?]
7. Can I be descended from Charlemagne or William the Conqueror?If you are of European ancestry, yes, it is possible. Both Charlemagne and William left progeny--sometimes illegitimate--who have descendants living today. In medieval Europe, illegitimacy had a more strictly legalistic significance than today, relating to automatic inheritance under either primogeniture or division of legacy. Many illegitimate lines are well known and traced. William the Conqueror himself was known as William the Bastard, not for his personality but for his birth "on the wrong side of the blanket." Note, however, that the majority of descents from medieval English monarchs are legitimate, not illegitimate. Remember that "descended from" and "able to document a descent from" do not mean the same thing. In the medieval period, most genealogical connections went unrecorded, and in only a certain percentage of cases do the records survive today. So, it is possible that you may be a descendant but unable to prove it.
8. Who were the parents of X?The soc.genealogy.medieval newsgroup does not have an official position on any lineage. Individual participants can and do have strong views on medieval family lines. Consider this a forum to share and air our views and the conclusions we've each drawn about these ancestries. We want a free flow of information that allows each reader to take responsibility for evaluating the information we share, pursuing the references cited therein if appropriate. While we all would like definite answers, the fact is that the surviving evidence from the medieval period is sometimes very sketchy, and, in some cases, the evidence is open to a number of incompatible interpretations. The temptation is to consider medieval lineages as verified because they've been around so long. In truth, some authors have made up connections or have made unwarranted assumptions about parentage in an attempt to tie families to royalty or nobility. For this reason, even long-accepted genealogies should not be taken as correct without some investigation. No genealogy can be "proved," but newsgroup discussion should help you to rate lineages on a scale from very likely to very unlikely. By all means, if you have anything to add to any discussions, we more than welcome you and your opinions. Don't be intimidated by the on-line experts.
9. Can we discuss Biblical lines here?This is not the proper forum for discussing the Biblical connections of ancient lines. They are off-topic mostly because they're outside the medieval time period (500 AD to 1600 AD). While mention of the Biblical connections is permissable, discussion should focus on the medieval portions of these lines.
10. Why do mythical and semi-mythical people pop up here?There are several reasons for this. One is that many pedigrees have been created showing the descent of royalty from important people, including mythical gods and goddesses. Another is the tendency over time to amplify the accomplishments of a real historical person, producing a semi-mythical figure. Maybe Wodin, King Arthur, et al., aren't completely imaginary. Mythical people will inevitably be discussed here--mainly to help us understand where the myth ends and history begins, but also because myths tell us something about the people that believed in them. Besides, they're fun and spice up medieval genealogy.
11. Glossary & Common AbbreviationsAlso see Glossary of Royal/Noble Titles at http://www.heraldica.org/topics/odegard/titlefaq.htm. Definitions:
Abbreviations:One of the most common abbreviations in medieval genealogy is "sp", or "s.p.", which stands for either the Latin "sine prole", or the French "sans posterite". Both mean the same thing, "without issue" (that is, without children). With "s.p." as the base, many more abbreviations can be built:
A number of these "s.p." abbreviations can be strung together to provide a fairly precise description of the person's relationships at his or her death, such as:
Other abbreviations commonly found in Medieval genealogy include:
Of course the standard abbreviations are used here also, such as:
soc.genealogy.medieval FAQ / June 1998 / wrei@erols.com |