Post
by Svartalf » Thu Feb 25, 2010 12:40 pm
I've got a colorful family tree...
On my father's side, it's pretty tame. The family name includes an old word meaning 'cart road', so I suppoes the one who was family head around 1530 was some sort of teamster (unless he just happened to live by that road). My paternal ancestors emigrated to Bordeaux from the outskirts of Auvergne in the early 1600s, but it looks like one of those auvergnat guys married some kind of Gypsy woman, since her name looks distinctively Romanian. Thereafter, they were attorneys and sollicitors in and around Bordeaux, my grandfather inherited large areas of Landes forest and a vineyard or two from their marrying into landed and bourgeois families in the area. My grandmother was from such a bourgeois family, from the Armagnac area of Southern France... I lack data on that branch of my ancestry, but the fact that all men from that side (including my father, uncles and myself) have a distinct Moorish cast of features, I strongly suspect they are descended from converted Jews who came From Spain in the 1500s when the Catholic Kings expelled them.
On my mother's side, it gets more colourful. My grandfather was the son of a butcher, who made a fortune as a shipchandler in Saint Nazaire (at the mouth of the Loire) in the late 1800s, the heyday of the transatlantic steamers. My grandmother's folks on her mother's side were Breton, emigrating progressively from central Brittany until they settled in Nantes, with some branches around Paris. They were wealthy Bourgeois, and through them I'm related with everybody who's anybody in Nantes and with half of Brittany's major families (including several noble families, and such luminaries as Jules Verne and Victor Hugo). Her father was Norman, and the family is weird : They were enormously wealthy until my great grandfather ate it all, though I'm not sure where the money really came from. The clan is first recorded in 1599 when they were ennobled by letters patent signed by King Henry IV. Their buying the title seems unlikely, as that kind of practice came about only 50 years later. The arms imply country gentlemen (an ear of wheat and bunch of grapes), but also include a crescent that's supposed to mean they were in the crusades (presumably as men at arms, since they were made true nobles only 3 to5 centuries later), that warrior background probably also means that they wre commoner followers of Rollo who settled Normandy after around 753 rather than autochtonous peasants. What even stanger is the kind of marriages that family managed to make. One of my ancestors was a colonel in one of Louis XIV personal lifeguard and did some unprecised but clearly outstanding service to the Crown, as he got two major rewards for it : his title of viscount was upgraded to that of Marquess (the title still held by my mother's first cousin), and he was married off to the King's own bastard daughter by Louise de La Vallière. even more interesting, his son or grandson married a lady by the family name Stewart, descended from a lesser younger son of James III, IV or V of Scotland (not sure, I haven't had access to the papers that would make genealogies clear), whose father had been a "gentleman of the Chamber" to the old pretender, and married a wealthy postmistress/innkeeper from the town next to my ancestral seat. I still don't know how such new and minor nobles were deemed worthy to marry women of royal blood, even illegitimate or diluted.
Embrace the Darkness, it needs a hug
PC stands for "Patronizing Cocksucker" Randy Ping
They don't like it up 'em.
Actually, I think he's just cuckoo. 
