Yes, I am descended from royalty, so there

My mom has been interested in genealogical research as long as I can remember. She has huge stacks of scrapbooks and papers covering just about every ancestor of ours through the 1800s and dipping into the 1700s. These include photographs of relatives, in-depth records of everything they did, grave marker rubbings, the whole works. She's a true historian. She's trying to capture their lives in as much detail as possible.

I think that's very cool and I'm glad she's doing it. For my part, I just like the trivia of looking at a huge genetic flowchart and saying, whoa, that's my people! Whatever I am, that's where I came from! It's an interesting experience to put one's own narrative in the context of a narrative that dates back to...

Well, I wanted to know how far back we go. Tracie and my mom were talking about genealogy last night -- Tracie's traced her family back to Ireland (mother) and Scotland (father) -- so today I spent some time poking around a website she recommended: Family Search, the genealogical search engine created by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who many may not know have been gathering and preserving genealogical records worldwide for over 100 years. I asked my mom for a really old relative she had traced back to on her side of the family, and she gave me Rebecca Sarah Bell (b. 1766). Family Search is kind of cool because you can easily search for a deceased relative and through the "Pedigree" feature the site shows a family tree if the information is available.

I was in luck. Through Rebecca Sarah Bell, and her mother Sarah Wingate (b. 1736), I found the Blount line in my ancestry (Sarah Wingate's mother was a Anne Blount). That line goes way back, I learned, in a clear series of named ancestor after named ancestor, all the way to a Robert "The Admiral" Le Blount, thirteen generations earlier. Le Blount was born in 1029 in Guisnes, Picardy, France.

Now here's where it starts to get interesting. Robert Le Blount's father was Rudolph, the Count of Guisnes (b. 980), his grandfather was likewise Count of Guisnes (b. 905), and his great-grandfather, Gottfried (b. 852) was the friggin' Prince of Denmark!

Hamlet was the Prince of Denmark!!

Okay, so I'm descended from the Prince of Denmark. What else can I find? Well, here the LDS records end so I have to turn to Google. Gottfried, Prince of Denmark, was married to Princess Gisela de Lorraine, my great, great, great, great... something or other grandmother. Her family, being royalty and all, has an ancestry well-covered. She's fourth generation descended from Emperor Charles Charlemagne (747 - 814), who I guess would be my great, great, great, great, great... something or other grandfather!

I'm descended from an emperor!!

But wait, there's more. Through Princess Gisela de Lorraine, I am actually able to trace my genetic milkshake all the way back through several kings of France, and several kings of the Franks (West Germanic tribes), to King Clodius II of the West Franks. King Clodius II was born before 6 A.D. Holy crap! That's like Jesus times!

Okay, so it's all just trivia and whatnot. It's not like I have an emperor's inheritance waiting on me for having discovered that I'm descended from an emperor, and whatever blue blood I have is mostly watered down with moonshine anyway (most of my family is from the South Carolina area for the past few centuries), but it's still very, very awesome. It's just one spoke along the line too, and just on my mom's side. I was just clicking back and back to see how far I could go. There may be other notable ancestors I missed in the process. Still, in the very least, I now have snobbery rights.

Bow down and kiss the feet of Emperor Jeremy! Behold the mighty ruler!