a) Kate Middleton is very English. Not a Welshman or Irishman to be seen, one Scottish great-great-grandfather. And you have to go back 10 generations to find Gaston Martineau, a surgeon who fled France in 1685 (presumably a Protestant threatened by the Edict of Fontainebleau), and his wife Marie Pierre. The Goldsmith connections don't appear to be Jewish (5 generations married in church, apparently) - in the 1700s they're Kentish carpenters.
b) social mobility
The background of each of Kate Middleton's great-great-grandparents, as far as is currently known, can be summarized as follows:
- Middleton - Tradesmen in Yorkshire rising to professionals (attorneys)
- Asquith - Tradesmen in Yorkshire
- Lupton - Background of his grandparents:
- Lupton - Tradesmen in Leeds
- Darnton - Tradesmen in Leeds
- Greenhow - Professionals from Yorkshire
- Martineau - Clergymen and professionals from Norfolk and Northumberland
- Davis - Clergymen and professionals from Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and elsewhere in western England
- Glassborow - Tradesmen from Surrey
- Elliott - Tradesmen from Surrey
- Robison - Clerks from Scotland
- Gee - "Gentlemen" descending to tradesmen
- Goldsmith - Labourers from Kent and Hertfordshire
- Dorsett - Labourers in London
- Chandler - Labourers from Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, rising to tradesmen
- White - Tradesmen from Somersetshire and Buckinghamshire
- Harrison - Miners in Northumberland and Durham
- Hill - Mariners in Durham, later tradesmen
- Temple - Miners in Yorkshire and Norfolk
- Myers - Agricultural labourers in Yorkshire
Around 50% middling men and women (the Luptons were a well-known Leeds family - there's a university hall of residence named after one of them), 50% working people. One jailbird, Edward Glassborough, an insurance company messenger - wonder what he was in for ?
c) the seeming total absence of bastardy. Everyone has two parents, and they are married to each other. So much for the historical revisionists.
d) I see one of the Harrison miners married a Jane Liddle. Hopefully there's a Rod Liddle link. What has apparently been established are links to Guy Ritchie, to her husband Prince William, and to various other aristocrats*. The native population of these islands being a partially inbred extended family**, there are bound to be links. Go back 10 generations and you have 2 to the power 10 i.e. 1024 ancestors, which takes you back to the 1600s. Go back another 10 generations, to the 1300s, and you have over a million forebears. There are around 50 million native Brits in the UK, each with getting on for a million forebears in the 1300s - but there were less than 10 million Brits around in the fourteenth century. Obviously we*** have an awful lot of ancestry in common.
* as you go back and records are scarcer, those for whom records ARE available tend to be the great and the good, so a tree gets biased towards higher classes as you go back.
** the inbreeding being generally inside the distinct populations of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, at least until the greater mobility of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
*** those who are not, like myself, the son of an immigrant father. That's most of the native Brits.
5 comments:
The Middletons are a model family. If the political intelligentsia truly do want more social mobility, they would stress the benefits of rearing children within the boundaries of marriage. The pro-marriage Ian Duncan Smith - the only Tory in the government - and who has overseen a lot of research on the advantages of this institution, has been very quiet on this issue of late.
"AFAIK, the 'proving' of a relationship by pre-marital intercourse, with marriage the result of pregnancy, was ONLY a custom of the Isle of Portland, and notable because it was such an exception." - Biased BBC
I believe there is a reference to this custom in "The Winter's Tale", so we would presumably be talking Warwickshire there.
It's often occured to me that ancestry.com will usually give the lie to the gibbering nation of immigrants idiots
The genetics and the work of Francis Pryor gives them the lie when it comes to pre-historic, Romand period and Dark Age populations as well
It does strike me that should be circumspect these days when one uses the term in-breeding as regards the indigenous population, as there isn't any comparison with what is going on now in towns and cities throughout the land
surely miners were the only ones who descended in regards to their profession.
"Davis - Clergymen and professionals from Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and elsewhere in western England".
totally and utterly Welsh, goboi.
Not necessarily after generations of dilution in England. Alas we don't know more than that Rev Davis came from Newland, which is in "the Forest" - so he's on the Welsh side of the Severn.
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