Scottish Russians?

Due to the mixed origins of my own last name, I have a continuing interest in surnames from one country that clearly show roots from another. For example, the late Tad Szulc was born in Poland, but his name obviously indicates a German connection. The Dutch names Van Arragon and Antonides would appear to suggest Spanish/Catalonian and Greek roots respectively. Now we read of this intriguing possibility: Scot to bring DNA from Russia with Lermontov. It seems the well-known Russian name Lermontov may once have been Learmonth, with roots in Scotland.

Surnames

Here is a list of the most common surnames in Canada as a whole and in the country's five largest cities. According to this CBC report, University of Toronto Prof. Jack Chambers argues that

Over time, the number of surnames has actually not increased with the population, which has made many of them even more common. Says Chambers: "We've got just exactly the same resources now as we had a thousand years ago in Europe, and 3,000 years ago in China when surnaming began."

Well, not exactly. I don't think he's taken into account cultures where surnames are a quite new phenomenon. When I was growing up I had a lot of relatives whose surnames I didn't even know, and it never occurred to any of us in my immediate family to ask. Surnames were simply not all that important on that side of the family. Many had been taken on only with immigration to the US and elsewhere.

My father was born with a patronymic only. When he went to school the authorities wanted every student to have a first, middle and last name, so he took on his grandfather's surname, which may have had French or Turkish origins, and grecianized it to Κοϊζής, later anglicizing it to Koyzis. This means that my own surname is only about ten years older than I am.

In the Dutch-Canadian community with whom I work, I have long heard that Dutch surnames were chosen only about two centuries ago when Napoleon forced them to take them on. The Dutch often chose humorous or tongue-in-cheek names, assuming this was a passing fad and would never stick. Two-hundred years later their descendants are still saddled with them.

As for the Koyzis name, due to the paucity of married males to pass it on to future generations, it may end up dying out altogether. So perhaps Chambers is right after all.

Genealogy and DNA analysis

My wife Nancy has recently hit the jackpot with respect to her ongoing genealogical research. Although family lore indicated that she is 4th great-granddaughter to Benedict Calvert of Mount Airy, Maryland, a prominent American colonial whose father was Charles Calvert, the 5th Lord Baltimore, up until recently there was no proof of this. Now there is, as her father underwent a DNA analysis which came up identical to a known descendant of Benedict's via his illegitimate son, William, who is buried in rural Pennsylvania.

Now it remains for Nancy to demonstrate a rumoured descent from King George I, whose illegitimate daughter may or may not have been Benedict's mother. (Benedict was raised apart from his parents.) My first thought is that a member of the royal family might be persuaded to undergo a similar DNA analysis, which could point to a blood relationship with my father-in-law. However, there is some question whether the current Queen and her brood are actually blood descendants of the Hanoverian line.

A few years ago British writer A. N. Wilson, perhaps best known for an unflattering biography of C. S. Lewis, published a book titled, The Victorians, in which he argued, based on medical evidence, that Queen Victoria's father may not after all have been Edward, Duke of Kent, but Sir John Conroy, with whom her mother may have had an affair. I recall my high school biology teacher, during a lecture on genetics, pointing us to this possibility already 35 years ago. If so, then the rightful King of England (and of Canada) might well be Prince Ernst August of Hanover and the rightful Queen Princess Caroline of Monaco!

          
Sources: New Brunswick Community College, BBC, PBS

Edward, Duke of Kent     Queen Victoria     Sir John Conroy

However, upon comparing portraits of the two possible paternal candidates, my own admittedly subjective judgement is that Victoria more closely resembles the somewhat dowdy Duke of Kent than she does the dashing Conroy.

Now just how does one go about getting the Queen to submit a tissue sample?

Children of Abraham?

Abraham is big these days. My wife recently published a scholarly monograph on Abraham traditions in early Judaism. The three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are often referred to collectively as the Abrahamic religions, since their adherents count Abraham as their spiritual forebear. But what if there is more to this connection than is currently supposed? Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, responding to David Klinghoffer’s Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, raises an intriguing possibility:

Scholars generally agree that in the first century there were approximately six million Jews in the Roman Empire (for some reason, Klinghoffer says five million). That was about one tenth of the entire population. About one million were in Palestine, including today’s State of Israel, while those in the diaspora were very much part of the establishment in cities such as Alexandria and Constantinople. At one point Klinghoffer acknowledges that, during the life of Jesus, only a minuscule minority of Jews either accepted or rejected Jesus, for the simple reason that most Jews had not heard of him. Some scholars have noted that, by the fourth or fifth century, there were only a few hundred thousand, at most a million, people who identified themselves as Jews. What happened to the millions of others? The most likely answer, it is suggested, is that they became Christians.

If Neuhaus is correct, and given the apparent implications of statistical genealogy, there would seem to be a good possibility that most Christians -- at least those in the middle east and in the west with longstanding christian roots -- are, quite literally and biologically, children of Abraham. One can only imagine what impact this knowledge might have on Jewish-Christian relations.


Mother of God Church

Later: Here are population statistics from Jeff Malka's Sephardic Genealogical Resources:

Jews in Roman Empire:

25% of Roman population in Eastern Mediterranean

10% of entire Roman Empire

48 C.E. Roman census: 7 million Jews (mostly in Judea, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Babylon, Iran, Yemen and Ethiopia) for an estimated total of 8 million world wide.

Malka's total population figures differ with Neuhaus' sources by one million, but both appear to agree that Jews constituted one-tenth of the Roman Empire's population, which I admit comes as a surprise to me. That Jews made up fully one-quarter of the population in the eastern Empire is even more remarkable. Of course, Iran, Yemen and Ethiopia were not part of the Empire, and "Babylon" (Mesopotamia) was only briefly within its boundaries.

A 'blueblood' society for the Antipodes?

Although I have a longstanding interest in genealogy for less purposeful reasons, some people's interests in this field are motivated by the desire to join one of the following "blueblood" societies: the United Empire Loyalists' Association of Canada, the National Society of The Colonial Dames of America, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Membership in such societies is undoubtedly a satisfying experience for those able to prove prestigious ancestral connections. However, I rather like the idea behind this website: Convicts to Australia: A Guide to Researching Your Convict Ancestors. Makes you wonder what sort of societies might spring up down under from this research.

Finnish Orthodoxy and a Finnish ancestor

The vast majority of Finns are at least nominal Lutherans, but there is a small percentage of Orthodox Christian Finns, most of whom originally came from eastern Karelia, the historic territory around Lake Ladoga. Today I rediscovered in my vinyl record collection two volumes of Orthodox Church Music from Finland, published by Ikon Records. The first volume contains music sung by the Hymnodia Choir under the direction of Archbishop Paul of Karelia and All Finland, and the second includes music by the Ecumenical Quartet. Texts are sung in both Church Slavonic and Finnish. I think I purchased these at the Anglican Book Centre in Toronto close to 15 years ago, when they were selling the last of their stock of vinyl albums.

Most of my Finnish ancestors were Lutherans, but among the meticulously-kept parish records which have come into my hands one often finds someone listed as having been transferred to the Orthodox parish in Kajaani. This would appear to signify a conversion, probably due to intermarriage.

Incidentally, just yesterday I received a remarkable letter from a distant cousin in New Mexico who found my genealogical webpages. She was kind enough to send me three photographs, one of which (below) is of my great-great-grandfather, Justus Korpinen (1848-1941), who is buried in the cemetery in Oskar, Michigan, located in that state's upper peninsula.


Photo courtesy of Mary Ann Kauppila

Justus Korpinen, seated, with grandson

I was, of course, pleased to receive this, as I had never before seen a photograph of this particular forebear, although I had known of his existence since childhood. I doubt that I look much like him. We both have beards, but I myself am not bald. Then again he was apparently in his 80s when the above photo was taken. By that age I too might be bald.

A centenary tribute

Today marks the one-hundredth birthday of my maternal grandmother. Frances Marie Hyder -- Marie to one and all -- was born in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, to Nelson and Lucy Jane Bentley Hyder, the third of ten children. Around 1914, when she was ten years old, the family moved to a farm outside Adrian, Michigan, and here she grew to adulthood. She married my grandfather, Eino Korpinen, around 1928, and together they had two daughters, the younger of whom is my mother.

I remember her to be a loving woman, as I suppose most grandmothers are. Yet what I associate most with her is a cheerful disposition and an optimistic outlook on life. She was always singing around the house, something my mother picked up. That she would be such a "cockeyed optimist," to quote Oscar Hammerstein, was somewhat surprising given that her life was a difficult one from virtually beginning to end. Her upbringing was not especially happy, from what she told me. Her marriage was unsuccessful. Shortly after my mother's birth, she was a single mother attempting to feed and raise two daughters in the midst of the Great Depression.



Marie with her mother, c. 1922

By the time I came along, she was in her 50s. We would visit her at least twice a year, often around Easter and then again in the middle of the summer, when we would sometimes spend weeks at her house in a small town south of Ann Arbor, Michigan. If my father was unable come along, we would take the New York Central from Chicago to Ann Arbor, where she would pick us up. On other occasions my father would drive us there via the recently-built Indiana Toll Road. While there we would often visit other relatives and friends with whom my mother grew up.

Decades later I found myself wondering what it was like for my grandmother, who lived alone and worked at an IGA grocery store in town, to have a family of eight (after 1963) descend upon her and expect to be billeted in what was essentially a two-bedroom house. I can no longer recall the sleeping arrangements, but I do recall a small back room off the kitchen where there was a bed. I believe this is where Grandma slept during our visits.

She was also a perennial visitor to our home at the American Thanksgiving holiday each November, along with my aunt, uncle and cousins.

I know little of my grandmother's personal faith. I wish I had had the presence of mind to ask her about this, but as she died when I was 20 years old, I undoubtedly felt myself to be too young before that point to broach the issue. In any event, it was not something she talked about. Although she was raised in a church-going family, she was no longer attending church by the mid-1950s. Yet she did own more than one Bible, two of which I inherited from her. In one she had underlined verses, so she was obviously conversant with the Scriptures on some level.

After she retired in 1969, Grandma was plagued by a number of maladies, including cancer and Parkinson's Disease. She eventually died in hospital from the effects of a stroke not too far from our family home near Chicago. Shortly afterwards, I had a dream about her that was as vivid as reality. Grandma was young again, younger than I had ever known her to be. She looked like the young girl of 18 or 20 in the old sepia-tone photographs we have of her. She was running happily through a beautiful meadow dotted with wild flowers. I can ascribe the dream to nothing more than the hope of a young man that he would once again see someone he had loved dearly for the first two decades of his life. Her final resting place is in the Oakwood Cemetery in Adrian, near the graves of her parents and grandparents.

Introducing the family: Niilo and Anna Juntunen

My great-great-grandparents were born in the village of Puolanka, in the north central part of Finland. Niilo Juntunen (1860-1934) brought his family over to the US from Russian-controlled Finland in 1882, when his eldest daughter, Anna Liisa (1881-1967), my great-grandmother, was less than a year old. Family tradition said that he came to escape conscription into the Russian army.

Apparently Niilo came over first and then sent for his wife, Anna Moilanen Juntunen (1859-1933), and little Anna Liisa. They settled near Oskar, Michigan, in the midst of the beautiful "Copper Country" in the Keweenaw Peninsula. Eleven daughters were born to Niilo and Anna, ten of whom survived into adulthood. Thus the family surname did not pass to any of their descendants

A quite nice account of Niilo and Anna Juntunen's immigration and life in upper Michigan is contained in an essay, "Journey to America," written by a distant cousin, Valerie Tuomi, as part of a project during her years at Houghton High School, Houghton, Michigan. The only significant error in her account is her assertion that, when the head of a family became a citizen in those years, so did the entire family. This is undoubtedly what Niilo and Anna themselves thought, and it seems to have been passed down the generations to Valerie. In fact, when, as an elderly woman, Anna Liisa applied for social security, she discovered, to her horror, that she had never been an American citizen. (All of her sisters, recall, were born in the US and were thus citizens from birth.) Somewhat implausibly, she feared deportation.

In any event, she died at the ripe old age of eighty-five in 1967 and was buried in Hancock, Michigan, near the final resting place of her husband, Jacob Korpinen, and their son Wesley, who had lost his life in the Pacific during the second World War.



The Juntunen Family, 1905

In the photograph shown above, Anna and Niilo are seated in the centre. Seated to Niilo's left is his son-in-law Jacob, or Jaakko (looking rather like a young Theodore Roosevelt). Anna Liisa stands to the far right of the photo. Three of their children, Jennie, Bill and Esther, are with them, with the latter two on their father's lap. Judging from the apparent ages of the children, Anna Liisa is almost certainly carrying my grandfather, Eino Justus, who was born in December 1905.

Niilo and Anna died more than two decades before my birth, but I recall seeing their daughter (my great-grandmother), Anna Liisa, on at least one occasion -- in either 1963 or '64, by which time she was nearly deaf, suffering from advanced diabetes and living in a nursing home near Detroit.

In July 1988 a huge family reunion was held at Suomi College (now Finlandia University) in Hancock, Michigan, of the descendants of Niilo and Anna. I and my immediate birth family were privileged to attend this event, along with some 300 other relatives.

Travels through the Alleghenies

Our family just returned from just short of a week in Pennsylvania, where we were attending two family reunions, one for my wife's family and the other for mine. The first took us to Altoona, where my father-in-law was born and grew up and where a number of Nancy's cousins and an elderly aunt still live. Altoona is snuggled in the Allegheny Mountains, making for some spectacular scenery and a remarkable 19th-century engineering feat which we were privileged to see during our stay.

Nancy's great-great grandfather, Michael Henry Calvert (1809-1879), was one of the early settlers of Altoona and a grandson of Benedict Calvert of Mt. Airy Plantation, Maryland. We were able to locate his grave stone in the Fairview Cemetery. Two neighbourhoods in the city were named for him: Calvert Hills and Calvertville. My father-in-law grew up in this vicinity and gave us a guided tour, complete with memories of friends and relations and the houses in which they had once lived. Somewhat later in our travels Nancy was able to locate the cemetery where her 3rd great-grandfather, William Calvert (1770-1847), was buried. This was at St. Peter's Lutheran Church, near Newville.

Altoona is a railfan's paradise. The Pennsylvania Railroad dominated the life of the city for generations, and a number of my in-laws worked for the company in its heyday. It was long a competitor with the New York Central for the Chicago to New York run until it merged with its rival in 1968 to form the ill-fated Penn Central. In 1976 the PC merged with a number of other eastern US lines to form Conrail, which became the equivalent of what Canadians would call a Crown corporation until it was privatized some years later. Altoona residents nurture the memory of the PRR in a number of ways. We ourselves visited two associated landmarks. The first was Horseshoe Curve, a remarkable engineering feat completed in 1854 which allowed trains to make it up a particularly difficult stretch of the Allegheny Mountains. It is styled the "eighth wonder of the modern world." Over the Independence Day weekend just past festivities were planned to mark the 150th anniversary of the Curve, and Vice President Dick Cheney was expected to be present.


Railroaders Heritage Corporation

Horseshoe Curve

The following day we visited the Railroaders Memorial Museum, right downtown adjacent the railroad tracks. In addition to indoor exhibits there are quite a few old Pennsy cars and locomotives outdoors, all lovingly maintained by those dedicated to the memory of the late great railroad which provided transportation for Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. There were apparently other rail-related sites in the area which we did not see.

From Altoona we drove southeast towards York, just north of the border with Maryland. Here we celebrated my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. Here too there is an historic railroad, which we nevertheless did not ride. This was the first time in a number of years that our extended family was together. I most enjoyed the music that is a feature of our family gatherings. My sister's lovely and talented daughters harmonized especially well. Remarkably, although I have written of the dangers posed by popular music to genuine folk music, we found ourselves singing some of the jazz standards of the 1930s and '40s, that is, the popular music of the day. As my brother-in-law is an accomplished bluegrass banjo player, we were delighted to hear him perform as well.

While in that part of the state, we drove through nearby Lancaster County, known as Pennsylvania Dutch (i.e., Deutsch) country. It is particularly known for its Amish residents and culture, reflected in the presence of horses and buggies and of farms lacking electrical power.

It was a successful trip in every way, but we're glad to be home again.

A Swedish victory at Poltava?

Conservative pundit David Frum wonders, while visiting Stockholm, how history would have been different if Sweden's Charles XII had won the Battle of Poltava against Russia's Peter the Great. What if's are always fascinating though ultimately pointless. Yet I suspect that my 6th great-grandfather, one Gotthard Witzell, would have returned to his home in Livonia (in present-day Latvia) rather than going to Finland, where he begat generations of Finnish descendants, some of whom would eventually make it to North America. Not to put too fine a point on it, I would not be here.

Later: As I consider the matter further, it is entirely possible that none of us as individuals would be here if Sweden had won at Poltava. It's not to say there would be no people at all; only that each of us with our unique identities might never have come into existence while other unique persons who were never born would have been. There are probably people -- presumably with independent means -- who devote their time to calculating the number of possible alternative universes predicated on the slightest variances in a single historical event, such as Poltava, Waterloo, Gettysburg, &c. I will not venture to judge those who are experts in this field, except to say that I myself am not one of them.

A tragic anniversary

This month marks the 800th anniversary of the sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Although the Crusade was originally directed at Egypt, the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, succeeded in diverting it to the fabled first City of what was then still known as the Roman Empire. That Christians would prey on other Christians is, of course, nothing less than a scandal. Much of the booty wound up in the Venetian Republic, including the famous bronze horses that had once graced the hippodrome.


Ecumenical Patriarchate

Hagia Sophia, Constantinople

Greeks have long memories and are still bitter over this offence from the west. In fact, 1204 looms much larger in their minds than 1054, the year in which the churches of Rome and Constantinople formally broke ties. Here is one contemporary account from the Greek side by Nicetas Choniates: "The Sack of Constantinople." In 2001 Pope John Paul II visited Athens and issued an historic apology on behalf of his Catholic ancestors for the Fourth Crusade. It is worth noting, however, that even Innocent III, who was Pope at the time, was horrified by the crusade and subsequently excommunicated the crusaders. Furthermore, since the crusaders also attacked the Catholic city of Zara, along the Dalmatian coast, this tragic episode ought not to be portrayed as exclusively a Catholic-Orthodox dispute.

Two decades ago I was privileged to attend an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago titled, "The Treasury of San Marco, Venice." Included was a wealth of Byzantine artefacts from La Serenissima. My enthusiasm at viewing this fantastic collection was tempered by the realization that this was stolen wealth. Nearly a decade earlier I had stood in Venice itself, once a vassal of the Empire but which had broken with it, remaining an independent republic until Napoléon extinguished it in 1797.


Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche

San Marco's bronze horses

My genealogical research has revealed that Alexios IV Angelos, the ill-fated Byzantine Emperor who lost his throne just prior to the sack of the City, was variously my 24th, 25th and 27th great grand uncle.

Murdered ancestor

One-hundred-thirty-nine years ago yesterday the American Civil War ended and my 3rd great-grandfather, David W. Wells (c 1815-1865), was reputedly murdered. There is more than one account of how this happened. Here is the event as related very briefly by Lucy Jane Bentley Hyder (1875-1948), my great-grandmother:

On the 9th day of April 1865, (the day the surrender was made) during the Civil War my grandfather, David Wells, and my uncle, Hiram Creech, were murdered (shot) by the Raiders of the Ku Klux Klan as they were sometimes called. They first removed his (David Wells') Sunday vest which he was wearing, and then shot him.

A more detailed account is written by Tom Smith, a descendant of Hiram Creech (c 1827-1865), and thus a distant cousin of mine. He appears to have supplemented his account from Lucy Jane's recollections, as found on my own genealogical pages. I have corrected his spelling.

Hiram Creech and at least one of his daughters were visiting family in Lee County, Virginia. On the 9th day of April 1865, the day the Civil War surrender was made, Hiram Creech and his brother-in-law David Wells, were murdered (shot) by Rebel [i.e., Confederate] guerrillas (sometimes referred to as the Raiders of the Ku Klux Klan). They removed Hiram Creech's boots and David Wells' Sunday vest, and then shot them. Hiram's daughter managed to get away. They apparently were sitting on a rail fence when the Rebels approached them. One of the Rebels supposedly had been like a brother to Hiram many years earlier there in Virginia. This is the one that shot him and then took the boots off his feet. From all the traditional stories I conclude this may also have been true. When they saw the Rebels coming, they hid but the Rebels saw them and told them to come out and they would not be harmed. So they came out and climbed up on a rail fence. The Rebels then proceeded to shoot them. Hiram's boots were made by his son, Alexander. After the war Alexander spent some time looking for the man who killed his father.

David Wells and Hiram Creech were married to two sisters, Nancy Jane Elkins (1822-1887) and Mary "Polly" Elkins (1824-1875) respectively.

Related by marriage?

From the CBC: "Calvert holding Martin to health care promise." Could the premier of Saskatchewan be a distant in-law? My guess is that he probably is in some way.

Ancient origins of an American state flag

In the United States every state has its own flag. My personal favourite is that of the state of Maryland, which is more distinctive than its 49 counterparts and has much earlier roots in England.



(From FOTW Flags Of The World website)

The design is from the coat of arms of George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, the black and gold sections belonging to the Calvert family and the red and white crosses belonging to his maternal Crossland family. My wife is, of course, a Calvert.

There is no coat of arms for the Koyzis family, as far as I know. But if there were, it would almost certainly include an olive tree or possibly a cruet of extra virgin olive oil.

Avalon and Lord Baltimore

There was an interesting article in the weekend edition of the National Post about the first permanent English settlement in Newfoundland, called Avalon, established by my wife's 9th great grandfather, George Calvert, the 1st Lord Baltimore, in 1621. The article doesn't get it quite right, however: "In 1621, Sir George Calvert (later known as Lord Baltimore after he 'discovered' Maryland) set up one of the first English colonies in the New World, in cod-rich southeastern Newfoundland." In fact, the king had already named Calvert the Baron of Baltimore after his estate in Ireland. He was given the proprietorship of Maryland only after leaving Avalon in 1629 due to the harsh climate. He might thus have become the first Canadian snowbird if he had not died in 1632, before he had a chance to get to his southern and more temperate colony. The following is from the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage site:

Despite the severe religious conflicts of the period, Calvert secured the right of Catholics to practice their religion unimpeded in the new colony, and embraced the novel principle of religious tolerance, which he wrote into the Charter of Avalon and the later Charter of Maryland. The Colony of Avalon was thus the first North American jurisdiction to practice religious tolerance. . . .

More ancestors: Vladimir I of Kiev

I am teaching Russian politics this semester, which necessarily involves acquainting my students with the highlights of Russian history. Indeed I have long had a fascination for Russian history, ever since taking an undergraduate course in the subject nearly three decades ago.

Last year, during my genealogical researches, I discovered that among my direct ancestors is included Prince Vladimir I (also known as St. Vladimir, or, in Ukrainian, Volodymyr) of Kiev, who converted the people of Rus to Orthodox Christianity in 988.



He is variously my 30th through 37th great-grandfather, and I am descended from him in scores of ways, through two of my ancestors, David and Nancy Elkins Wells, my maternal 3rd great-grandparents. Of course, as I've written before, virtually anyone of European ancestry who might be reading this is similarly descended from him.

I have long admired the Russians. Is this descent enough to make of me a Russian? Can I truthfully call myself a Russian-Canadian? Perhaps, but then again so can virtually any reader of this blog. Furthermore, I might just as well call myself a Phoenician-Canadian, because Phoenicians settled my ancestral island of Cyprus close to three millennia ago. The farther back one is able to trace one's ancestry, the less statistically significant it is to claim to be descended from any one person living then. Scores of millions of others are similarly descended.

Statistical genealogy: everyone's related to everyone else

Last year I discovered that I (and of course other members of my immediate family) are descended from Alexios I Comnenos, one of the greatest of Byzantine emperors, who reigned from 1081 until his death in 1118. He is variously my 25th through 29th great grandfather.


Alexios I Comnenos

How unusual is it to have aristocratic and royal ancestors? Not at all. If we go back 20 generations, multiplying each successive generation by 2, each of us supposedly has 2,097,152 ancestors of that generation alone. After 30 generations each of us apparently has 2,147,483,648 ancestors of that generation. After 40 generations we each have 2,199,023,255,552. These numbers are clearly fantastic, because the numbers of human beings that have ever lived on earth are far, far short of 2 trillion! This means that if we go far enough back we are descended from the same fairly small number of people many times over, particularly if our origins are in the same part of the world.

For example, each of us in my line of the family is descended from Charlemagne in more than 100 different ways through at least three of his offspring. Thus anyone claiming special status for being descended from royalty is making an exceedingly insignificant claim. It certainly will not put one in line for any thrones! The real pleasure in researching genealogy comes to those already possessing a love of history in general.

Coincidentally, shortly after I came to the above conclusions, confirmation appeared in an article by Steve Olson, "The Royal We", The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 289, no. 5 (May 2002), pp. 62-64. Citing Mark Humphrys, who maintains a website titled "Royal Descents of Famous People", Olson argues that "everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne."

Before the fall of his regime, Saddam Hussein had employed professional genealogists to demonstrate his descent from the prophet Muhammad, obviously to enhance his legitimacy among traditional Muslims. As it turns out, virtually any westerner he would chance to meet (not to mention his fellow Arabs) is also descended from Muhammad. It's simply not a statistically significant claim.

Introducing the family: Archbishop Edwin Sandys

The Very Reverend Edwin Sandys (1519-1588) was Archbishop of York during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. He may have been my 13th great grandfather, depending on whether his 2nd great granddaughter, Elizabeth Gorsuch (1641-after 1680), married my 9th great grandfather, Capt. Cornelius Howard (1637-1680), which is in doubt.



Sandys was sympathetic to the puritan cause in England, and he was one of the people responsible for the translation of the Bishops' Bible, a predecessor of the King James Version. Here's more from a rootsweb genealogical website:

He was educated at Cambridge University, became Master of Catherine Hall, and Vice-Chancellor of that University. On the death of King Edward in 1553, he preached a sermon proclaiming Lady Jane Grey Queen, for which act he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, his cell mate being John Bradford. About a year after, he was pardoned by Queen Mary and removed to Germany where he was followed by his first wife (whose children died in infancy of the plague.) He returned to London arriving on the day of Queen Elizabeth's coronation.

On December 21, 1559 he was made Bishop of Worcester by Queen Elizabeth. In 1570, he was made Bishop of London. In 1577 he was promoted to the Archbishop of York, which office he held until his death.

Sir Edwin Sandys (1561-1629), the son of the Archbishop, was a member of the council of the Virginia Company at the time the first settlement was established at Jamestown in 1607. He was responsible for the establishment in 1619 of the first representative assembly in the Americas, the Virginia House of Burgesses. His sister Anne (1570-1629/30) may have been my 12th great grandmother.

Introducing the family: Cypriot ancestry

Admittedly I've not done any work in researching this branch of the family. All I have is hearsay from relatives. I doubt records were kept before 1878, the year Cyprus passed into British hands. Surnames tend to mean little in the island, as most people went by patronymics until recently. (My own father was born with a patronymic only and no surname, which he adopted in adolescence from his grandfather's.) In any event, if there are records they have not been posted on the internet.



At Paphos,
with a nonrelative

Statistically, however, it is likely that my father is descended from virtually everyone who was living in Cyprus as recently as half a millennium ago, including nobles, clergy, peasants and towns people. (But not monastic clergy, of course, since they are celibate.)

More on what is called statistical genealogy later.

More ancestors: Benjamin and Elizabeth Bentley

On our honeymoon Nancy and I visited Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where my maternal grandmother was born. While there we found the headstones of my 2nd great grandparents (that is, great great grandparents), Squire Benjamin Bentley (1849-1903) and Virginia Elizabeth Wells Bentley (1854-1917), in the Riverview Cemetery in East Stone Gap.



The Bentleys, late 1890s?

Benjamin's ancestry can be traced back only to the beginning of the 18th century in Alexander County, North Carolina, and possibly to England at the end of the 17th century.

Elizabeth's ancestry can be traced very far back and connects in innumerable places through both of her parents with what genealogists call the world family tree. The world family tree consists of centuries of royal and noble genealogies from whom virtually everyone is descended in some way. Elizabeth's parents were also (like my wife and me) named David and Nancy, surnamed Wells. David was murdered, apparently by the Ku Klux Klan or a predecessor group, on the last day of the American Civil War in 1865. Nancy died of measels some two decades later.

David's great grandmother was named Hannah Howard, whose ancestors seem to include the Howards who were the Dukes of Norfolk in England. Nancy's grandmother was named Jerusha Booth, whose ancestors include several generations of knighted Booths going back to Adam de Booth (b. 1255, d. ?).

More on the world family tree later.