“Germanic pre-Christian ideas of ancestry wouldn’t necessarily be totally intuitive to a modern person looking back.“ This is a favorite topic of mine. I rarely pass up a chance to point out others who agree with me. Here, Simon Roper. The old, poetic genealogies handed down by our remote ancestors “were probably not completely reflective…
Tag: Royalty
Medieval Irish Genealogies
A good orientation to the problem of trusting medieval Irish genealogies. Don’t make the mistake of copying what you find online. It’s all very interesting, but it’s not vetted genealogy. Donnchadh Ó Corráin, “Creating the Past: The Early Irish Genealogical Tradition” in Chronicon 1 (1997) 2: 1-32. ABSTRACT: Traditionally Irish early medieval genealogies were seen as the…
Holy Grail, Holy Fraud
Honestly, nothing makiies me crazy quite like supposedly serious genealogists taking data straight from books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail and others of that ilk that should be just entertainment. I often think I should take on a systematic study and create a website devoted to the subject. Not going to happen, so I’m happy…
Foreign Origins
Our European ancestors often did genealogy as propaganda. Nowadays it’s sometimes hard to convince new genealogists, people who might have only a limited historical education, that there wasn’t some secret, oral, underground stream of tradition that has been suppressed by clumsy academics. No. It was pure propaganda, and today we can see through it easily….
Royal Fakes
One of my main academic interests is the way genealogical fakes are created and preserved. For many years I was active on Geni.com, working with other volunteer curators to round up and fakes, get them corralled, and so improve the quality of the medieval tree there. In the end it turned out to be a…