Subject: Re: The Augustan Society's "Descents from Antiquity"

From: [email-masked] (Stewart Baldwin)
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 02:57:57 GMT

[email-masked] wrote:

>On Thu, 18 Apr 1996 Stewart Baldwin wrote:

>[snip]

>>I would be much more inclined to take the project seriously if there were
>>more emphasis on trying to find a well documented line which went back to,
>>say, someone born before the beginning of the Christain era.  (I know of no
>>example that even comes close to that.)  Of course, the other part is
>>interesting too, but a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and if
>>you can't get back to 1 B.C., you certainly can't get back to 1500 B.C.

>A question directed to Stewart and others in this newsgroup with a broader
>knowledge of genealogy than me. (Gee - thats pretty much everyone!)

>How far back does the earliest documented genealogical line (with modern-day
>descendants) go? Can we get any better than the early sixth century and
>Fergus mac Erc of Dal Riata? (To use an example I know something about. I do
>suppose that there are a number of other document Irish lines which go back
>to about this time.)

This was a subject of discussion in this group a while back, and I
posted a long discussion of this once, which I no longer have a
complete copy of (due to a mistake I made on inadequately understood
new software).  If someone could find a well documented descent back
to the Merovingian kings, then you would probably have to give "first
place" to that line (by a little bit), but I know of no such descent
that is widely accepted (but early Frankish genealogy is not my strong
suit, so experts on those lines please correct me if I am wrong).
Other early dyansties such as the Ostrogoths and Visigoths have the
same problem that no known well documented line can be traced back to
them.  Even if a link were available to a Roman family, it is
relatively rare for an ancient Roman to have a well documented
genealogy more than a three or four generations long.  It looks like
the Irish and Scottish lines are the earliest documented ones, but it
is hard to assign "first place" status to any one of the families,
because there are differing opinions as to exactly what generation the
Irish genealogies become reliable, and the early chronology is not
clear.  (For example, if Niall of the Nine Hostages existed at all
(which he probably did), then his activities were almost certainly a
half century later than the traditional Irish chronology.)  Three good
candidates for "first place" would be the following.

1  Niall of the Nine Hostages (mid fifth century), ancestor of the Ui
Neill.  Most historians consider him to be historical, although there
are doubters.  The official pedigrees, which make Niall the brother of
three men who just happen to be ancestor of the main Connacht
dynasties, are extremely artificial (and chronologically suspect), and
it is likely that the pedigree is not historical prior to Niall.  Of
Niall's claimed descendants. the pedigree of Diarmait mac Cerbaill (d.
565), ancestor of the kings of Meath and Brega, and supposedly
great-grandson of Niall, has been questioned as suspicious [see the
discussion in Byrne's "Irish Kings and High Kings"], and possibly
fabricated, but there seems to be no such problem with the Cenel
nEogain pedigree of the kings of Ailech (descended from Eogan, son of
Niall), and ancestors of the O'Neills.  I am assuming that there are
well documented modern day descents from Niall Glundub (d. 919),
ancestor of the O'Neills, but I am not familiar enough with the later
medieval Irish material to be sure about this.  Because the survival
of Irish records has not been good, the number of currently living
individuals who could trace a well documented descent back to these
early O'Neills is probably relatively small.

2.  Dunlang (fifth century), ancestor of the Ui Dunlainge.  Gilbert
"Strongbow", earl of Pembroke, married Eve, daughter of the king of
Leinster, thus bringing the royal Irish blood into many of the early
prominent Norman families, from which a very large number of English
families can document a line of descent.  The marriage of Cynan of
Gwynedd to the granddaughter of the Norse king Sitric of Dublin (whose
mother was a sister of the king of Leinster) did the same thing for
many Welsh families.  The "Ban Shenchus" gives the parentage of quite
a few of Eve's female ancestors, but it is interesting that no well
documented Ui Neill descents seem to be available by this route.  (The
one such claimed descent I have found is virtually impossible on
chronological grounds.)  Eve's descent from the Ui Dunlainge kings of
Leinster give the best early descent, for there seems to be little
doubt that the pedigree is reliable at least back to the obscure fifth
century figure after whom the Ui Dunlainge were named.

3.  Fergus of Dal Riata (ca. 500?).  This is a good candidate, but I
am concerned about a "weak link" between Domangart (son of Domnall
Brec) and Aed Finn, for the following reasons.

(a) The sources do not all agree on the exact line of descent for
these generations.

(b) The Eochaid son of Eochaid who appears in the standard account
looks suspicious, because it was extremely rare for a son to be named
after the father during this period (the only other example I know of
being Cathal Cu cen mathair, son of Cathal, king of Munster).

Although the usually stated line could be correct, I think the matter
deserves more serious study, because no study of this genealogy which
I am aware of makes any mention of Promlem (b).

****************************************************************
*                                                              *
*  CONTEST               CONTEST                CONTEST        *
*                                                              *
*  (no prizes - no official judges - no official winners)      *
*  (i.e., just for fun)                                        *
*                                                              *
*  Does anyone else out there want to put forward some other   *
*  challengers for the status of "first place".                *
*                                                              *
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It is unlikely that these Irish and Scottish lines will ever be
reliably extended in a significant way, and the most promising looking
candidates for a line to antiquity go through several Armenian
families.  However, all of these families still have "weak links" at a
later date than the above Irish lines (and even worse weak links if
one wants to connect them to the early Western European nobility).
When I posted on this matter a couple of months ago, I mentioned a
couple of families giving possibly earlier lines whose status I was
unsure of, but got no responses (at least none that reached my news
server), so I will try again:

1.  Is there any modern day descent from the Sassanid kings of Persia
(who have a continuous well documented genealogy from the third to the
seventh centuries)?  (Perhaps through some Moslem lines?)

2.  How far back is the traditional genealogy of the current emperor
of Japan considered to be reliable by modern historians?

Stewart Baldwin