Ancestral Roots: An Important and Easy First Step to Royal and Noble Genealogy

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by John D. Beatty

Tracing descent from medieval forebears of the royal and noble houses of Europe can be an interesting and appealing part of genealogical research. It is easy, however, to be misled by erroneous research, especially if one puts too much faith in some published genealogies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which authors attempted to trace the lineages of American families to royal or biblical antecedents and made other claims that were neither documented nor provable. Genealogists are urged to exercise caution when consulting them, as they should with any secondary source that is not documented.

That said, there are also several well-documented secondary sources on medieval and royal genealogy in print that are highly acclaimed for reliability and widely accepted in the genealogy field. None of these is more renowned than Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists Who Came to America before 1700, now in its eighth edition. Created by the late Frederick Lewis Weis and continued and greatly expanded by the late Walter Lee Sheppard Jr., the book is often nicknamed the “Weis” book and is considered a basic source for doing medieval genealogical research. Genealogists interested in royal genealogy should make it a place of first resort because of its solid research, excellent documentation, and ease of use.

First published in 1950, the Weis book initially contained data on sixty English immigrants to early New England whose lineages could be reliably traced to royalty in British and continental sources. Subsequent editions authored by Sheppard and more recently edited by William R. and Kaleen E. Beall have revised that number to seventy immigrants, several of whom lived outside of New England. Later editions have also included numerous corrections and additions that are cumulative, and for this reason, researchers should consider only the latest edition, published in 2004, as the most authoritative.

If you have traced your ancestry successfully to one of these so-called “gateway” ancestors whose lineage has been documented in Weis, it is a relatively simple matter to trace that line to European royalty and nobility. Looking first in the book’s index, one is guided not by page numbers, but by the corresponding lineage and individual numbers beside each name. Each line appears in numerical order in the text, and each line contains multiple generations that are also individually numbered. The eighth edition includes 398 lines or lineage summaries, most which are tied to other lineages in the volume.

For example, the “gateway” immigrant Gov. Thomas Dudley (1576-1653) of Massachusetts has many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of descendants living today in the United States. While these descendants are not traced in Weis, Dudley himself appears as number 40 in Line 143, which traces his lineage back twenty-five generations to Louis II, King of the Franks, who flourished about the year 860. Other ancestors in this pedigree are linked to other lineage numbers in the book, including that of Louis himself, who, in addition to being number 16 in Line 143, is also number 16 in Line 148. Turning to Line 148 allows one to extend Dudley’s lineage back to Charlemagne, whose ancestry, in turn, is extended back even further as number 13 in Line 50. Users of Weis will find themselves jumping from line to line in this way as they gather additional data. They will also find documentation for each generation in notes that are imbedded in brackets throughout the text, and are encouraged to consult these references for “proof” of descent. A bibliography of sources, along with a list of abbreviations, is included in the front of the book. Research into royal and noble lineages remains on-going, so be sure to look for newly corrected and revised editions of the Weis book to appear in the future.

Article taken from the Genealogy Gems[1]: News from the Fort Wayne Library
No. 32, October 31, 2006