A big family

[matthewdaly]

The relatives who care about our genealogy were in town over the weekend. I don't care enough to get my hands messy with it, but the results are interesting. I've got a whole bunch of branches and even though most of them originally came from England and Ireland they all took their own interesting paths. The Dalys, frex, did something to score a trip from Ireland to Australia, then worked their way east to Hawaii and landed in San Francisco (although, surprisingly, they are evidently not the Dalys of Daly City) and worked their way east before settling in the Rochester area with some adventures in silver mining and the like scattered in. And then they married into some classy East Coast families who've been around since the Mayflower landed.

So, today I got an email cascade giving a report on breaking news in ancestor chasing. I'm a little fuzzy on whether the person in question is an n-grandmother or an n-great-aunt (for some n), but they discovered that she was descended from Thomas Chittenden (the first governor of the independent Vermont Republic, and later the first governor of when it became the fourteenth state), and from him all the way back to John Lackland.

And my first reaction was "Whooo! I'm descended from a King of England!!" And my second reaction was "Wait, I'm descended from the crappiest King of England. I'm descended from the thumb-sucking lion in Disney's Robin Hood." Of course, nearly every WASP in North America is in the same boat, including every President except Van Buren. I guess there wasn't much for the nobility to do in the thirteenth century except impregnating every attractive woman they could find. So, I suppose I will be content with having been descended from Eleanor of Acquitaine.

Comments

[matthewdaly]

Heh. I recall gearing up for college at the same time as Rochester's sesquicentennial in which we proved that the Dalys have been around since before the settling of the city (which is not hard to prove when your great-great grandfather is buried in the local cemetary), and the line as it was understood at that point went back to William Bradford and evidently through some Revolutionary soldiers whose names I do not know. At that time, my mom was very excited about the prospect of my being able to join the *AR, but I suspect that was more about college scholarships than self-aggrandizement.