This regular posting contains a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and their answers about Royal genealogy. It should be read by anyone who wishes to post to the GEN-ROYAL mailing list. The FAQ is currently available on the World Wide Web at http://www.erols.com/wrei/faqs/royal.html.
If you have any comments or additions or would like to suggest further topics to be included, then please contact William Addams Reitwiesner (wrei@erols.com).
Copyright (c) 1999 by William Addams Reitwiesner. All rights reserved.
This document may be freely redistributed in its entirety without modification provided that this copyright notice is not removed. It may not be sold for profit or incorporated in commercial documents (e.g. published for sale on CD-ROM, floppy disks, books, magazines or other print form) without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Permission is expressly granted for this document to be made available for file transfer from installations offering unrestricted anonymous file transfer on the Internet.
If this document is incorporated in a commercial document, a complimentary copy should be sent to William Addams Reitwiesner (wrei@erols.com).
This document is provided AS IS without any express or implied warranty.
GEN-ROYAL is a mailing list for the discussion of genealogies of Royal families. The primary focus of the group is likely to be on Europe and neighboring regions, but postings about genealogies of Royals elsewhere are welcomed.
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Occasionally someone will post an Ancestor List (or Ahnenlist, or Ahnenreihe) for a Royal person. This will consist of a numbered list of persons without any explanation of how the persons are related to each other. The following explanation of the numbering scheme used in Ancestor Lists is slightly modified from a message posted to GEN-MEDIEVAL by Stewart Baldwin on 26 November 1998.
The idea of Ancestor Lists is simple. They provide a numbering system whereby all of the known ancestors of a single individual can be listed in such a way that no two different ancestors receive the same number, and such that the numbers themselves are enough to deduce the claimed relationships. An Ancestor List starts with the individual in question (i.e., the person whose ancestors are to be traced) as number 1, for example:
The parents of that individual are then numbered as follows:
The next generation (the four grandparents of individual number 1) are numbered next:
The next generation (the eight great-grandparents of individual number 1) then receive the next eight numbers (i.e., 8 through 15). So, for example, Mary, Queen of Scots, mother of James VI & I, would receive the number 9. This continues for as far as information is available, with the 16 2nd great-grandparents having the 16 numbers from 16 to 31, the next generation having the 32 numbers from 32 to 63, and so forth.
If an ancestor is unknown, then the number that would have been used for that ancestor remains blank. This results in unused numbers for the earlier generations also. That is normal in ancestor lists, for even the best documented families will eventually reach a point where the information is unknown. If, at some future date, the information becomes known, the relevant numbers are still available, and can be used to fill in the data in its proper order.
As long as no ancestors are duplicated, things work out exactly as above. However, anyone who traces their ancestry far enough back is going to reach a point where they are descended from the same person in two or more different ways. In this case the ancestor in question will have two or more ancestor numbers. The first time that this happens in the ancestor list of Charles II is with his third-great- grandmother Margaret Tudor, who is ancestor number 35 AND 37 for Charles II. (Although both of the ancestor numbers occur in the same generation in this particular duplication, that will not always be the case.) In this case, the standard practice is to introduce a cross-reference, as follows:
Here, 34 and 36 were not duplicated, because Margaret had children by two different marriages, both of whom were ancestors of Charles II. It is the general custom that, whenever such duplications occur, the "main" entry will be under the smallest number, and larger numbers are cross-referenced to the smaller one. It is considered bad form to enter earlier generations under both numbers, so Henry VII (Margaret's father) would be listed only under number 70, and the number 74 (along with all of the corresponding duplicated numbers in the earlier generations) would remain unused. People who ignore this rule might find that they are wasting vast amounts of paper on duplicate information when they print out such a list.
One nice property of this numbering system is that there are simple arithmetic rules which allow you to determine the relationship of the individuals in the list:
To see how this can be used, suppose we take the ancestor number 54321. Dividing by two (27160.5) and then discarding the remainder gives 27160. Repeating this process over and over then gives, 13580, 6790, 3395, 1697, 848, 424, 212, 106, 53, 26, 13, 6, 3, 1. Using the even-odd rule described above, we get:
Thus, the individual numbered 54321 will be the 13th great-grandmother of the person numbered 1, with the above list showing exactly which intervening generations are male, and which are female.
In the opposite direction, if you wanted to determine the ancestor number of Charles II's mother's father's father's mother's mother, you would start with 1, multiply by two and add one to get 3 (mother of 1), multiply by 2 to get 6 (father of 3), and so forth, getting 12, 25, and 51, the number of the ancestor in question (Marguerite de Lorraine in the case of Charles II).
Note: An Ancestor List is sometimes called an Ancestor Table (or Ahnentafel). Strictly speaking, an Ancestor Table is in tabular form:
|----- 4 -------
|
|----- 2 -----|
| |
| |----- 5 -------
|
----- 1 -----|
|
| |----- 6 -------
| |
|----- 3 -----|
|
|----- 7 -------
But the numbering scheme used in Ancestor Tables is the same as the one used in Ancestor Lists.
Also see Glossary of Royal/Noble Titles at http://www.heraldica.org/topics/odegard/titlefaq.htm.
Definitions:
One of the most common abbreviations in royal genealogy is "sp", or "s.p.", which stands for either the Latin "sine prole", or the French "sans posterite". Both mean the same thing, "without issue" (that is, without children). With "s.p." as the base, many more abbreviations can be built:
A number of these "s.p." abbreviations can be strung together to provide a fairly precise description of the person's relationships at his or her death, such as:
Of course the standard abbreviations are used here also, such as: