Are my Ancestors Magna Carta?

Question

Hi All,

Apologies for not being clued up on this, but I've just updated my ancestors on Ancestry.co.uk and noticed some had titles like Sir.  I googled one and traced back to descendants as far back as 980AD.  Is this normal?  I've uploaded my GEDCOM file and seen the report, but I'm not sure what it's telling me.

Kind Regards

Mark

Answer 1

There are two ways to look at it. if you go back to the time of Magna Carta, about 800 years or about 30 generations, you have a billion or more ancestors. That's more than the global population at that time. So there's a good chance that many of your ancestors were knights and royalty. The problem is to prove it, with solid evidence.

On the other hand, there's a lot of garbage floating around, based on no evidence and a lot of wishful thinking.

So, to answer your question: it's possible. But you need good evidence to prove it. Not user-submitted trees on Ancestry.

Comments

Hello Marc.  It is not easy to prove your ancestors that far back.  It takes time and many dead ends.  WT has some wonderful learning tools, such as online videos and help pages.  G2G is one of the best.  Take the advice of these experts, ask questions on G2G and likely someone else has asked the same question.  Start with you and work backwards, eventually you can verify your ancestors by hooking up with another tree branch down the road.

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Thank you.

I let Ancenstry fill in the 'potential' parents and accepted their recommendations.  When it stopped recommending i googled an interesting name as it had a coat of arms and prefix of Sir.  From there I've now gone back as far as 650AD.

Maybe i should recreate my Ancestry tree on WikiTree starting from me?

Regards

Mark

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Hi Marc, I agree.  I found out when I started with myself on WikiTree that Ancestry had already grabbed a hold of my paternal grandfather and grandmother.  Their family tree is notable and prolific.  I joined the England Project and Profile Improvement Project where you can move along at your own pace with a mentor.  I found that there are a lot of mistakes with the GED imports; there was a disagreement for a while with me and others who claimed the same GGG grandmother.  There is always work to do on WT and a fantastic group of mentors.

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Thanks Jacqueline,

I’ll start adding tomorrow x

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Added some ancestors today, also found an orphaned match, merged a duplicate and I have info of fathers and mothers which are missing from existing profiles.  I can’t add them yet until a week has passed and I’ve made 50 contributions.  Should soon be able to join the missing dots to the existing profiles from pre 1000…

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Wonderful Mark.  I think you're hooked and you will have your February badge in no time.