As an Icelander when I use Íslendingabok (online genealogy tool open for all locals) and go back about 30 generations to the Age of Settlement I am pretty much related to everyone back there from the chieftains to the lowest slave. Reliable parish records will get you 10 to 15 generations back to the early modern period. Anything before that is based on haphazard personal correspondence, annals and eventually Sagas I think.
An icelandic friend of mine told me that you guys have an app so you can check if youre related to a potential partner since your only about 300 000 people in Iceland. That must be wild to use on a night out lol.
I find geneaology an interesting way of seeing how my own family history fits into larger patterns of migration and social and politial changes. For the most part, records are pretty decent in the Americas and Europe to get you back into the early modern period as long as you had ancestors who didn't mess with records or didn't on purpose change their identities or have super common names. Anyone named Smith or Johnson is going to have a hard time even with more recent records. I have zero interest in finding connection to royalty anyway, I just like sussing out stories.
I don't know, I met this guy who had a table set up by the mall food court who used my last name to trace my family lineage back to a royal house in Switzerland. Turns out I'm supposed to be Pope. I also bought 2square feet of land in Scotland which makes me a Lord and related to that guy from Braveheart.
I love that you mentioned how unlikely it is that certain genetic markers continue to occur after multiple hundreds, even thousands of years. I have degrees in history and biology, and I know how random assortment means that not every trait survives in the descendants. On top of your typically thorough and entertaining video, that is just the icing on the cake. Thank you!
People easily forget that more recent family history can be just as interesting to research. Through church records I can trace my paternal grandfather's family to 1606, revealing that they have been Swedish-speakers living in roughly the same area of Uusimaa for the entire period. My paternal grandmother's family history stretches to 1603 and reveals that they were originally Finnish-speakers, until the 1800's when the family moved southwest from Savonia. But the really interesting bits in her family are the various entries noted with "father unknown", which sets the speculative gears into motion. Same goes for previously unknown family-branches, which we have lost contact with due to internal fights between siblings. There is a ton of juicy drama going on among poor Finnish peasants, without the need for any royal connections. :D
In the late 90s, a popular author in Sweden wrote a series of novels about a fictional 12th century crusader from southern Sweden, Arn Magnusson. The books became hugely popular and even spawned a theme park near where the fictional Arn was born. What then happened was that people with an interest in genealogy started to attempt to connect their ancestors to Arn. I'm not sure if they genuinely hadn't realized that Arn was entirely fictional, or if they deluded themselves into thinking he was real for the "glory" of being a descendent. This was 20+ years ago, but I wouldn't be surprised if some still believe it...
I remember seeing a movie called Arn the Templar a decade or so ago. Interesting because, at the time, it was basically the story Kingdom of Heaven but Swedish. I'd never heard it was adapted from a series of books, if it's not just a coincidence.
That's just embarrassing. Arn is said in the book to be the grandfather of Birger Jarl, all it takes (beyond just looking up the book, as it is fiction) is a few minutes of looking at who was Birger Jarl's true grandfather. (Hint: Not named Arn.)
The scientific reasoning is stronger in that it's actually mathematical reasoning that if you go back beyond a certain breakpoint, then everyone alive during that period is either the ancestor to everyone alive today or no one alive today (with secluded peoples being the exception). This breakpoint has to do with population calculations, and while I'm not fully familiar with how it's done, I know that Charlemagne is one of the figures often given as "either everyone's his descendant or no one is."
You don’t even have to go back as far as Charlemagne. Some people have done the modeling to show that if you have any English ancestry you’re more than 80% likely to be descended from Edward III, and he was born almost 500 years after Charlemagne died.
For what it's worth a simple exponential gives a fair idea of how this might work. My back of the envelope calculation goes like this: every generation has two parents, so the number of ancestors N you have at a given generation p away from you is N=2^p. So at generation p=1, your parents, you have 2^2=2 ancestors (your mother and father). At generation p=2, 2^2=4 ancestors, i.e. 4 grandparents. Supposing that each generation is 25 years apart (probably a conservative estimate), with the viking age being about 1000 years ago, or 1000/25=40 generations ago, you have 2^40=1,099,511,627,776 ancestors in AD1022. That's about 10 times the number of modern humans who have ever lived. So clearly there must be a lot of (hopefully distant) in-breeding, but equally, it's hard to imagine that any one person's genealogy going back that far is anything special, unless there was a *ton* of inbreeding - and I wouldn't be shouting that from the rooftops.
@@liquensrollant Going back ten generations, you would have 2 to the power 10 = 1024 eight x great grandparents, if they were all different people. Twenty generations gets you a million people, and 30 generations a billion people. That's probably more than the population of the earth in that era, so there must be a lot of duplication. A single ancestor 30 generations ago would provide one billionth of your DNA each time he/she appears in your family tree. Another way to look at this is that you are probably descended from almost everyone in your country, and maybe even continent, if you go back far enough.
Reminds me of my aunt Viola Berge that got a letter telling her that the Berge family descended from royalty and she could get their family crest. No, all my Norwegian family knew we were all descended from peasants but her proof that this wasn't her family's crest was that there wasn't a cat on it and given the affinity for cats all of us have it couldn't be hers.
A letter from whom? I do not quite understand. Nowadays your heraldry is usually just your sword-side (patrilineal) coat of arms, making personalised quarterings is no longer really the custom. In that case your family should be directly patrilineally descended from said royalty, i.e. it basically is the same family. Now, stuff like that does actually happen. Here in Sweden we had a medieval noble family officially reintroduced to the House of Knights in 1992 - after it had been declared extinct since the 1660s - by a letter being found showing that the "last" member had a distanced son whose line had continued. This could be the case of your family, and by custom (or even law depending on the country) it would give your family the right to use that coat of arms. But it could also be a sleazy company whose business it is to fake stuff, like those websites trying to connect coats of arms to surnames in and of themselves, which is not the how it works. While it is certainly true that many nobles families have a single distinct surname, other noble families have several distinct surnames, some have several variations of a surname, sometimes one surname is used for several distinct noble families, which are sometimes not even related, sometimes a noble family has an extremely common surname, the bearers of which the the vast vast vast majority are not noble, which is especially common in Anglophone countries.
Everyone is descended from royalty at some point. My family was 99% farmers from northern Sweden, but it turns out we were descended from the now extinct noble clan Blix, and they in turn were descended from Norwegian nobility who came to Sweden in the 14th century. These Norwegian nobles have a clear line back to Harald Fairhair, who no doubt has millions of grandchildren walking around today.
Mathematically speaking, the people in Scandinavia and England during the viking age are so old that you can say that "if their direct lineage survives to the present day, and you are of english or Scandinavian decent, you are related to that person in the past." The identical ancestors generation for English or Scandinavian people, its coming up around the time of the late viking age. This generation is called the identical ancestors generation because those of us alive today are related to everyone in that generation by direct desent (except those who's lineage died out)
not interested exactly in specific people but i do have an interest in understanding what my ancestors lives mightve been like. i find it more personally valuable to recognize their reality and the hard work and struggle that eventually came to me. im...made of all that..
I always appreciate your frankness and emphasis on reliable evidence without simply spouting speculation Dr. Crawford! It's refreshing and, unfortunately, rather rare on these UA-cam channels. Thank you for sharing the information!
We actually have a few families in Norway who can trace their history back to the 12th-14th century and probably a little earlier. There are, for example, the Galtung (meaning wild boar) and Bolt families. The challenge, however, is that the Danes, as a consequence of the Dano-Norwegian Realm (1536-1814), tried to eliminate the old Norwegian noble families for political reasons. Male members of the families were killed or simply disappeared so that Danish noble families could take over their domains in Norway. Today's descendants of the oldest Norwegian noble families are therefore usually descendants of women. In addition, the Black Death (approx. 1350) led to approx. 2/3 of Norway's population died and there is therefore little information from that time.
As you point out Jackson, it is usually only more or less famous people/families that we know from bygone times. These were rich people, nobles, kings, poets, writers, priests etc. It was only in the 15th and 16th centuries that ordinary people could get a lasting legacy as a consequence of, for example, a position as chief mining inspector in a copper/silver mine. Records in reports and accounts were then signed and the surname, title and position thus secured for posterity.
In Iceland anyone can basically trace themselves to anyone since settlement. Decode Genetics created an online genealogy database from all the records where anyone can look up how they're related to any living or dead Icelander since 870. It's purpose was mostly for genetic research. Basically all living Icelanders are 10th cousins at most and anyone can petty much trace their lineage to almost any Icelander in the Viking age, assuming they had a surviving lineage. Sources like Landnámabók also do recite the lineages of many settlers further back to kings and such, including Ragnar Loðbrók.
@@meginna8354 As far as I understand, the vast majority of Icelanders are of Norwegian descent if you go back far enough. There was, however, some female admixture from the British Isles (which the Vikings brought from there), but otherwise the vast majority of the first Icelanders came from western Norway.
There was a lot of dubious genealogy done in Norway in the late 19th and early 20th century, and many of those dubious lines are still repeated today, and are rarely doubted, because they're repeated so many places.
We must remember that genealogical descent and genetic descent are not the same thing. In each generation there is a chance of adoption or false parentage that may or may not be recorded and these chances vary over time. Even if one can document a genealogy what are the chances that a particular ancestor's blood flows in your veins?
Apparently the genetic line does die out after so many generations. I only learned this when Richard III was dug up out of that car park, because the person they used to validate the DNA was in his 50s - his children couldn't do it because he was the very last of the genetic line. I suppose it makes sense really... the blood gets more diluted over the generations.
Exactly! When I saw Russ in my genetic makeup, oh boy was my dad super excited. He's a rip-roaring Rusophile, everything from Russia is the Bestest Evarr. I took great joy I pointing at the REST of it and telling him, "Dad... it's largely Scandinavian... The Russ we got is *probably* from a slave or two." The pouting was glorious.
@@paulaunger3061 The genes are still there, some parts of our DNA are much more stable than others but it can become hard to distinguish the more it gets spliced.
@@SoulSoundMuisc Or not. They may have been or claim to have been from the early settlers of what is now Ukraine! Kyiv was founded by them as was Novgorod. It does help a bunch to know some history with our research.
I like the modern Íslendingabók(yes, the icelandic dating app /s ), using genealogies, church records and sagas to trace back the genealogies of Icelanders. I once took part in a study done by DeCode (Íslensk erfðagreining) and if memory serves that on my fathers side I am allegedly descendant of the brother of Sæmundur Fróði (Sæmundr the Learned) (1056 - 1133). And in Íslendingabók i managed to trace my fathers family line to the late 700's (780'ish) Scotland to a man named Baldvin. No idea if that is true, cool if true, no skin off my back if not.
Just this morning as I was reviewing commentary on some Sagas and decided similarly that if in person they could not determine a royal line, why ought we believe any of it? It was a great, riveting story where I just HAD to know what happened to the chick. Ok, sorta spoiler here, but The person in question was a German lady who asserted that she was some royal descendant who was long thought dead. The actual "princess" had several reliable, firsthand witnesses of her demise, yet, the popular folk of Norway wanted to believe that this was really the princess. The pretender was put to death, but still the majority believed her and so " sainted" her. Great story! But, as previously commented, I was left pondering what was used to determine the truth, and if they struggled to make sense of it how on earth could we? (noticing how closely so many well-intending and seemingly researched genealogies matched the Sagas so perfectly,) These sagas had to have been used as a source for many personal histories... but, even the commentary gave the feeling that this was a book of gossips, and based on a truth probably, but maybe only loosely.
I was born into the Mormon faith, which as a culture as well as religion is well known to actively pursue genealogy records. Although it's not my chosen belief system today, it's likely this has greatly influenced my interest in my family lines and it's a fascinating pursuit. Results of Ancestry DNA supported the records found and has my DNA connected to mostly Scandinavia, Scotland, Iceland and the UK. As far as any royal blood, it's a toss of the dice in my view. It really does get pretty messy when you think of how many children were conceived through, well, messing around. It is what it is. After many generations, the DNA does change, and for humankind, that's mostly to the advantage of the species, or hopefully, anyway. For example, studies of ancient Norwegians showed they were plagued with intestinal parasites, but over time, their bodies changed to combat this and although found to be successful at that for the most part, the trade off, so to speak, was that the Norwegian population and also a considerable part of the Scandinavian modern day population now has a great propensity for emphysema and lung disease. I have COPD, so can't say that I am a benefactor of that particular evolutionary process. And so it goes.
Love the authentic approach you have! In this point in history we are all mutts so tracing our DNA we can only go back so far. The past is a good point of reference and we can learn from it but it's better to live in the present and continue evolving & improving! From san Francisco I'm wishing you.. All the best!
Norwegian (amateur) genealogist here. You are quite right. We have documents that can trace lineages back to the 1700s, sometimes to the 1600s. Before that we have to rely on less and less reliable documentation, and the more generations you go back the more chances of errors. I can trace my own lineage back to Harald Hårfagre, Gorm, Gange-Rolf and so on, but the chances of those lineages being correct are pretty slim. We do have ongoing projects trying to document male (y-dna) and female (mt-dna) lineages farther back (which is possible), but you can't know much about these distant relatives (not even their names) using this technique, only that two people with their DNA tested have a common ancestor an estimated number of generations back. We Norwegians are much more closely related to our American cousins than to our Icelandic ones, and even the American connection is often hard to document.
I'm pretty sure both Haraldr Hárfagri and Göngu Hrólfr have no documented lineage, and are only mentioned or referenced by authors like Snorri, making it somewhat unclear on whether they even existed.
@@meginna8354 Various Icelandic sources (cf. Chapter 4 of Orkneyinga Saga, Chapter 309 of Landnámabók, Chapter 9 of Knýtlinga saga and Chapter 24 of the Saga of Harald Fairhair), as well as Chapter 210 of the 13th century Fagrskinna, confirm that Hrólfr aka ‘Gǫngu-Hrólfr’ Ragnvaldsson, the first ruler of Normandy, was a son of Ragnvald Eysteinsson ‘the Wise’, Earl of Møre (Norway). Earl Ragnvald is said to have been a son of Eystein ‘Glumra’ (‘the Noisy’) Upplendingejarl and Aseda Ragnvaldsdotter, a daughter of Ragnvald ‘Heidumhære’.
I've heard statistics that say that once you go back about a thousand years, you're basically descended from the entirety of Europe who still have descendents today. Nothing specific, though.
I read that too, but it doesn't make any sense. Icelanders have Icelandic ancestors for a thousand years, with little added, and few emigrations. Italians have Italian ancestors for a thousand years, with a bit more people coming in and out. But I doubt a person from northern Iceland and one from a remote valley in Italy necessarily have a common ancestor in the last thousand years.
The Saga of the Volsungs is related to the German Nibelungenlied, an epic poem about Siegfried, Kriemhild, and Brunhild. Notably in this story Siegfried is from the Netherlands, Kriemhild is from Worms, and Brunhild is from Iceland. The poem is kind of Germany's Beowulf, except even older, and it (along with the Saga of the Volsungs) speaks of a deep story at the taproot of the Germanic peoples, perhaps even of the Proto-Indo-Europeans themselves. For those who read German, I can recommend the modernising translation by Karl Simrock; it was written in 1827 using language that was old-fashioned at the time, but it remains quite a bit more readable than Shakespeare for a modern English speaker, and the meter is very charming.
I dispute this. Last I checked (literally just now) Nibelungenleid's written form is 400 or so years younger than Beowulf's. Not to mention, Beowulf's oral tradition goes back as far as Volsunga Saga's (when it wasn't a "saga" yet.)
Our ancestors are the reason we are here right now, and even if we do not have to like all of them, we owe it to them to remember them. This is why preserving these genealogies was sacred back then, and still is for many of us. It is disrespectful to forget your ancestors. Who cares if someone makes a mistake sometimes? At least they have tried to find out, and become interested in their history.
I have been working on my family's history for many years, of course I was able to delve even deeper these last couple of years. Having deep roots in England, Scotland, Wales, Holland, Denmark, France and Germany there's bound to be some Viking in there, but of course only the nobility and aristocracy kept family records, so I can only go so far, but being curious I wanted to see if any historical Vikings might be there, and up pops Ragnar Lothbrok, Thorfinn 'the Skull Splitter' and King Cunut. But knowing that the records kept were written mostly by Christian Monks and through the saga's, it's definitely a stretch to believe it's accurate, I definitely take it with a grain of salt. What I like about finding historical figures in my tree is that I can research those people and learn more about the period, places and the events that were happening at that time in history (which affected everyone), it makes me feel more connected to my ancestors, as well as having the knowledge that I'm more closely related to half the population of Europe than I previously knew! Knowing more about your family's history, you know more about our shared history.
Went through this myself some time ago when I was interested in finding out more about my heritage, naturally I came across heraldry and thought it was until I found out that there's no guarantee that any symbol relates to your family line specifically. Low behold when I went to visit my grandpas house I saw a giant heraldic poster hung up and everyone was excited about it. I said nothing. Worse still is the fact that because we're Mexican, a surname is especially a bad tool to trace ancestry because in many cases we may have inherited it through slavery. Still though, study into my surname eventually led me to learning about the Goths and ancient Rome so It wasn't all a loss.
In the 90s my grandfather finally finished his leg work on our family genealogy. He said it was as accurate as he could get, given so many records were lost in WWII. He picked the trail up though as best he could. We've got some nobility in our past. Sure. He stopped tracking back when the information dried up. There's some Frank in there, and that's where it ends. He said we were lucky to get back that far. I did one of those tests and there's some Frank all right, a little Russ, some Dane and Norwegian. No fancy names, no "your family was royalty!" nonsense... and I wouldn't have believed if it had implied as much. Edit: the only nobility we have is disgraced and had to flee juuuuust before the French Revolution.
I'm not really interested in genealogy. I was told this story when I was a young boy: My great-great-etc grandfather was a soldier from southern Sweden, Småland I think it was. He fought in the 30-years war and survived. As wages he got a plot of land in Finland (then called Östland, Eastern Land (of Sweden)) and that's why I was born in Finland. I have no way to prove this (maybe I do, but could I be bothered?). My paternal grandparents were Swedish-speaking but as they moved to an area that was totally Finnish-speaking (except them) they had to learn Finnish. They were nowhere rich, nor they had any notable ancestors, just normal people. I love it this way.
I have lots of more recent Scandinavian ancestors I didn't even know about until a few years ago. But doesn't have as much bite as being connected to Orkney or Dublin, royalty or not. That is why I started in on your channel so don't knock it ;-) Genealogy research can be devastating to living family members. Getting my DNA done was essential to connecting to unknown relatives, that got me past the Family Bible though.
Before I finish watching the video, I’d think the British royal family (and anyone who is connected to them in the last 900 years) has a good claim to Viking descent through the dukes of Normandy
Not of course through any male line for the British Royals , the dynasty after the Normans, the Angivans was founded by a Frenchman, the next the Tudors by a Welsh descentant, the next the Stuarts by a Scot the next the Hannovarians by Hannovarians the Current Sax Gotha Coburg is also self explanatory except they call themselves Winsor.
I kinda found out the opposite. When correcting my maternal grandmother's line on Ancestry,I found out from her 2nd cousin that I'm related to Jefferson Davis,the president of the Confederacy. He acted like I was supposed to be proud of that fact. I also share ancestors in common with FDR and Daniel Boone. Crazy stuff to dig up for sure. You may not be a scientist,but you're with them,as they also care about what can be shown to be verifiable,demonstrated,and concordant with reality. Respectable people.
I can trace my ancestry back to Woden, i mean that's great and all he is the king of Asgard (or whatever the A-S equivalent is) but over here I can barely manage my bills, so how does this help me? Should I ask grandpa for a loan?
I was doing research for some short stories, when I accidentally discovered, that my ancester 42 generations back were Audur the Deepminded, Norwegian born christian settler in Iceland and former queen in Dublin/Dyflinn. On one hand I don't believe it, but it's a good story and it had me hooked on genealogy. On the other hand, I'm pretty much convinced, that my ancesters actually were vikings - or were living in what is called the viking age - as my DNA tells me to be 100 percent Nordic - 93 percent Scandinavian and 7 percent Finnish. My mother was Danish, my father is Norwegian with Forest Finnish ancesters (Finns immigrating to Norway and Sweden in the 17th century; Finnskogen had a big - maybe the biggest - population of Forest Finns). Another thing to consider: It is correct, that far back ancesters only hold a tiny piece of us, but we wouldn't be us, if they hadn't been them.
Fascinating vid. I wonder how much weight people in the mediaeval period actually put on who their ancestors actually were? A friend once traced my mother's family tree back to the 1550s - and that's where it stops, because prior to a law requiring every English subject to be baptised into the Protestant religion, nobody thought the births, deaths and marriages of peasants worth recording. I'm impressed the direct line was actually unbroken - friend did mine while on a break from his own, which had stopped in the early 19th century due to someone having an unmarried mother. I suspect the modern obsession is informed by ideas of blood destiny - romances about lost and secret heirs to thrones, rightful kings, etc. One 19th century academic claimed that Queen Victoria was descended from Odin - and Lord Burghley had his family tree 'traced' back to.... King Arthur! :D
I wish one day you would have a channel in Spanish, or your channel with subtitles. I like what you do and there is little content on the subject in Spanish.
I had a good laugh with this video. I have a DNA match on Ancestry who has a family tree with over 60,000 people. In exploring this tree trying to find the common relative, this person's tree goes back to Saint Olav, Ragnar, Rollo and beyond, all the way to the Norse Gods. It didn't take long to find flaws in the lineage to show that it was bogus. Alas, I'm not related to royalty or the gods. Just a descendant of farmers and fishermen, which beats royalty any day.
My grandmother and aunt were very into genealogy and have researched much of our recent family tree within the U.S., going back in some cases to the 1600s. I have some ancestry from Switzerland, where the church keep very good, detailed records for several hundred years and my ancestors lived in the same cluster of villages during those several hundred years, so that line of my family can be traced back very far compared to the rest... All the way back to around the late 1400s. But knowing, from their research, how few records there are earlier than that, I would be highly skeptical of anything that tried to tell me I was related to specific people in the middle ages.
Genealogical tracing back to royalty or major figures gets even less meaningful when you consider the maths of it. With each generation you go back, the number of ancestors doubles and the potential pool of candidates gets smaller as you go further back, because there were fewer people on the planet. My partner's uncle traced her and her brother back to William the Conqueror and he did a different route for each of them, specifically to demonstrate this.
Good job and for the most part agree. Today when we think the "Royalty" or Royal families and houses, it's very different from the earlier times & in some ways that's a very good thing. Even though they had great wealth it was more about controlling power over others and tons of support in doing so. Today we see all of these huge places but need to realize those happened over centuries. In other words for example, when you look at Windsor castle it look very different than it would have in the time of William the conqueror's. As far as proving decent from them, a good number may be but what does that mean for us today? How we treat each other is much more important. Thanks for your channel and so cool how you provide a good one for leaning more about those earlier languages. More could be said but for now have to go. Take care & thanks again
As a fellow crawford I can say that we are most likely loosely related. If you put a picture of me, you, and my dad side by side the similarities would be obvious. Grew up in a cowboy family myself so it gets even more similar the way we dress. I think it would be interesting to see how related me and you are with a shared last name and similar features.
What's your take on the genealogies given in the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE and their possible connections with genealogical information from Norse and Icelandic sources?
My dad needed to give up on his family research precisely because of the lack of surnames. In the 18th century there was just a long line of "George, son of George".x) Though Yrjö Yrjönpoika in Finnish. My mom had better luck with the line where there's a soldier in the 17th century, because soldiers were given surnames. For the DNA tests, so far I think I'm best satisfied with the general mapping of the Finnish DNA: 95% standard European mix, 5% Siberian. From my parents research I know I have some Polish and possibly German or Dutch ancestry (via the aforementioned soldier and the woman he married), but that's just a tiny bit, and doesn't really change anything compared to the general Finnish DNA profile.
There are some American families that have books of genealogy going all the way back to the Puritans. For example the Strong family descended from Elder John Strong has a book listing the complete descendants of Elder John Strong right up to the 20th century. And when you run into royalty you can get deep veins of genealogy. They often have to be checked because genealogy was propaganda justifying the rule of kings.
My grandmother was a Cain/Caine for the Isle of Man where a DNA study for Ydna that is passed down via male dna from fathers to sons. And they found the dna for Cain members, Keene family and a couple other family names, all had one male ancestor, of Norway decent, about 1000 a.d. give or take a few hundred years. Believed to be one of the descendants of the Crovan dynasty. Started by Godred Crovan. I wish they could find one of the family members graves so they could get dna from them, so it could be proven or dismissed.
The math is pretty simple. The number of ancestors you have (ignoring any incest) increases exponentially with generation. It’s just 2^n with n being the number of generations you go back. You have 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, 16 great greats, and so on. You only have to go back 500 or 600 years to have more theoretical ancestors than the entire population of Europe at the time. Of course in reality there is inter family marriages even of cousins that make this assumption far off from reality, but the implication is clear. With enough effort it is not at all hard to find that we are all related to someone of import several hundred years ago - it’s basically guaranteed.
@Fr-h WLH True, marriage between different classes and nationalities would be uncommon, but dalliances would be more common though generally unrecorded.
I got one for you, some of my "royal lines" trace back to Jesus Christ and another gose to Odin. They did like to make connections that bettered their claim to the throne.
The Odin relationship is actually believed as being of veracity by a number of archaeologists (though obviously according to them Odin was an actual King originally).
Personally, I find geneology searching can lead people to construe some pretty bizarre narratives about themselves and their family. More specifically, finding out that you have a distant relative from three generations back, who is from another country, often feels like a cheap way to feel special if your background is considered quite vanilla by other people. Like if your great-great grandfather on your mother's side was French or German or Polish, I have found some people who think that's reason enough to "claim" that culture as their own. But I find this to be a very inauthentic process, because the claimant often has no connection to that country's modern culture or people, or particularly language, and therefore have no lived experiences or connections beyond wanting to feel special. Like if you'd spent your entire life in England or America and then got dropped into modern France or Germany or Spain, you're not gonna suddenly feel like you "belong" just because your distant relative was from there. There's way more relevant factors at play. It's the sort of bullcrap I see when celebrities, like Lewis Hamilton, refer to South Africa as "the motherland" because of the colour of his skin.
That monthy python sketch you mention brought up the pain every Icelandic School child feels when having to go through those blasted sagas in school. XD Actually I don't know how the Icelandic curriculum is today, been 25 years since I was in school, but I remember having to remember who was son of this guy and then son of that guy then son of yet another guy and me just going "how is this relevant??!!!!! i don't care who his great-great-great-great-great granddad was, I just want to get to the fighting." On topic of the video, I don't believe my own genealogy when it goes past the 16-17th century, I might joke about being related to this and that famous guy from the sagas, but whether it's true is not something I really care about.
It has been postulated that all people native to Europe are descended from all the people that had children in Europe a 1000 year back. That is, it takes about 1000 years max that all people are related. For example, it would be highly unlikely that a native European would NOT be a descendant of Charlemagne. Especially in Iceland with a tiny population, everyone is descended from the first Icelanders. It's pointless to try and make yourself unique with genealogies when you're all the same.
Just a heads up. I'm not sure the grimfrost link in the description actually includes the affiliate code. From my view, the ?aff=183 part is no included in the hyperlink. I could be wrong though. Thanks for all the information.
I have been able to tentatively trace my ancestors back to minor nobility in the middle ages, which is unsurprising really given the further back the more families you are woven into and the chances of one of them having a knighthood or baronage is not insignificant. The family themselves at the time claimed to be a cadet branch of the original Seymour family (Jane Seymour and all that) but historians cast doubt on that, even back in the day families liked to boast of connections that made them look more important. I mean who not want to be related to the most powerful familiy in England in bluff King Hal's day?
There's a classic section in my family's genealogy. The records look reasonable back to about 1100 ish... Then when you get to a point where the claim says Ivar Halfdansson - Halfdan Sveidasson - Sveidi Heytirsson - Heytir Gorsson - Gor etc... whatever. The thing with this section is that there's about a 100 - 200 year age gap in their supposed births for each generation. So either I'm descended from some really long lived dudes or the genealogy is a bit... iffy. Incidentally, much like the rest of Europe, I'm descended from Charlemagne.
Dear Doctor Crawford, you are right. However, there are a lot genealogies that go very far back in history, most of them being very well documented. For instance, there are families that can trace back their roots for more a 1000 years, with every generation recorded in historical documents. Most of the aristocratic families have this type of records. But as soon as you get into the saga genealogies everything turns crazy. For instance, the Rurikids of Rus' can all trace their root back to Rurik, but nobody knows who Rurik really was. This is why this families are more interested to look for scandinavian connection using the well documented maternal lines. Even so, as soon as you go back in time, it is imposible not to get into myth. However, it is pretty easy to make connection to the scandinavian lines back to 9th century. With documents, graves, and genealogical data. There were also a lot of genetical studies, comparing genetical material from known graves of ancestors with modern genetic material of their descendents. For sure the sagas and other extreme genealogies are not so reliable, but combined with historical data and genetical material could be very interesting. All the best! Great topic.
If you take the tree of ancestors each of us has - there is no chance that we are *not* related to somebody in Scandinavia ca 800 So - the people have found a line of evidence to their great ancestors
What people need to remember about popular genealogy sites, it’s that someone entered the information in a system somewhere. Where did they get that information? What was their source? I was following my husband’s line one time, because it just kept going. It led back to Joseph of Arimathea. There were dozens of entries with this same information, so it’s got to be correct, right? Well, they all used the same source. “The Da Vinci Code”.
To be fair The best source for geneologies going preety far back is church records or parish records ala marriage contracts and marriage records , which in Scandinavia is harder due to Protestant destruction of Catholic land and monasteries ( which also happened in England) , and that it’s conversion was preety late ( dr. Crawford correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t local parishes and the church more broadly was preety decent at basically record keeping) , aka most people would marry in church so having some contract or evidence marriage was done or bautism ( aka records)
Doesn't help that people who say they're descended from a noble ancestor always pick the upper film of famousness, like Charlemagne or Henry VIII. I've never come across someone make the more plausible claim that they're descended from, idunno, the margrave of north Strassburg in 1620.
My 5th GGF was Tomys Swartwout, he was from Friesland, his wife was from Norway. He was born is 1607, and his wife around the same time. I know this because they were a pretty prominent family in The Netherlands and New Amsterdam(New York). My mother has just one percent of Norwegian dna, I have none. So you are right, I only have 5 regions in Europe. Genealogies for royalty was kept track of by the Roman Catholic, and later the Church of England. I did trace a branch of the family, my father's who were descended from Sigurd "The Mighty". 2 yarl of Orkney. But he was probably known about because of his battle with the Scottish earl of Orkney. It's the same with all these fake "Coat of Arms". If you weren't royalty, you didn't have one. So, you are right as usual. Disappointing, but right.
I've done extensive ancestry work since I was 11 years old; 21 years later and a DNA test, I know I'm not related to any royalty. I do feel as though some of my ancestors were definitely farmers, smiths, hunters, and warriors because that's what I feel in my own heart. Also just got your Poetic Edda translation, it's really good! I know you're a trusted source when even pagans are putting your book in their videos...just sayin'.
I'm Icelandic and can, as all Icelanders, use Íslendingabók (the genealogical Icelandic database, which you, Jackson Crawford, probably know of) to trace my antecedents. It of course relies on how interested Icelanders have always been in genealogy and how well it is documented in Iceland also in the case of "common" people (it helps how few we are, and have been, and isolated in the past). I can go back generation to generation to the 8th century. I am for example (according to Íslendingabók) direct descendant of Egill Skallagrímsson (30 generations) and Snorri Sturluson (24 generations) and the name of every ancestor in that line is listed (and additional information e.g. date of birth and death) and the source of the information for every ancestor is also listed. You can of course decide how well you trust each source listed. Wherefrom the information comes, is in fact listed for every person in Íslendingabók regardless in what century the person was/is born. It is common for an Icelander to be able to trace back like that to the Landnámsmenn (settlers) and famous persons in the Sagas (and not famous). When I use Íslendingabók, I'm usually more interested in my genealogy last 200 years, after all most Icelanders are related going 8 or 9 generations back. But it can be fun to throw in famous names in Icelandic history and see ok, I'm related to that person in that way. Also, if you meet a new person (Icelandic) you can look up in Íslendingabók whether and how you are related, generation through generation. It is that easy in Iceland. This is obviously based on informations registered in Iceland so you can't for example expect to find information about your ancestors before they moved to Iceland or after they moved from Iceland. Just for fun, here is my thread in Íslendingabók to Egill Skallagrímsson (30 generations): Egill Skallagrímsson, Þorgerður Egilsdóttir, Þorbjörg Ólafsdóttir, Ingveldur Vermundardóttir, Þorgerður Yngvildardóttir, Yngveldur Hauksdóttir, Snorri Húnbogason, Narfi Snorrason, Snorri Narfason, Narfi Snorrason, Snorri Narfason, Ormur Snorrason, Guttormur Ormsson, Loftur Guttormsson, Ólöf Loftsdóttir, Þorleifur Björnsson, Guðný Þorleifsdóttir, Sigríður Grímsdóttir, Einar Magnússon, Rögnvaldur Einarsson, Árni Rögnvaldsson, Guðrún Árnadóttir, Guðný Þorsteinsdóttir, Guðrún Erlendsdóttir, Jón Stefánsson, Jón Jónsson, Pálína Jónsdóttir, Magnea Herborg Jónsdóttir, Anna Björg Sigurðardóttir, Guðrún Magnea Karlsdóttir and me Anna Herborg Traustadóttir.
I had just read about that database in Adam Rutherford's A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. From that I gather that a lot of Icelanders have had their DNA sequenced, which could serve to validate or refute some relationships
Familysearch is good if you care to do these genealogies. I could reliably trace certain lineages to the Renaissance. It's a free non profit and relies on people scouring through public records with you to find the most authentic connections
I figure my relatives jumped ship and stole stuff or I wouldn’t be alive. My Neanderthal genes are ones at not many have though. I still don’t know my family name, perhaps Thag! Famous for being on the business end of a Thsgomizer.
Historians (or "historians") had a bad habit of shoehorning people into the same family tree as someone royal or noble. It's happened at least twice in my family. I am a Spencer, but most likely not one of *those* Spencers. Heck, I can't even be sure that the last somewhat confirmable Spencer in my tree didn't just take on the name for the prestige - the trail ran cold. I can't find mention of his parents anywhere. The other side of the family paid for someone to figure out their history in the mid 1800's. The man tied the family to a minor noble family out of France. I got suspicious when one of the patriarchs lived to be 104 in the 1500's and had 30 children. Major red flags. More digging lead me to find that this "historian" was known to just make stuff up and take people's money. Genealogy sites are great, but they can never be nuanced enough once you get back several hundred years, sooner in other parts of the world. You really need to read the source materials for yourself. I still enjoy finding stories about people who might have been related to me. It gives me snapshots of life in the past and how far we've come.
Would like to point out that at least in Sweden, maybe all of Scandinavia, church records are pretty accurate to about 1500. Sometimes a farm record will give an entire list of family members who lived there. The clergy kept their own genealogies as they went along and in some cases to the late 1400's. In England when you can find a match with a particular family and wills survive, you may be able to accurately connect there also. Think it was Ancestry's DNA service, when they first began, told me we are descended from the "ancestors of the Vikings" so it indicated a connection without being specific. Since part of my family were in western Sweden and DNA otherwise show a link with the people of eastern Norway, it probably makes sense. Do have to be careful of published trees though. They make sense up to a point but again lack of good documents of any sort make them suspect.
In Norway, the oldest records are from 1623. And that is one single church records. Most have been lost over time, even going back before 1800 isdifficult.
Btw, until the 1800th century, West Sweden was Norway. It was stolen from us. All the area from the present border and all the way down to Gothenburg was Norwegian. (And the same goes for Jemtland and Herjedalen).
@@ingersundeid7948 Appreciate learning that, Inger. I should have qualified the comment about 1500 for Sweden, since there was a fire in Stockholm Archives in 1686 that destroyed most of what was gathered there. But farm records and mantalslangd (sorry this computer won't let me use the proper Swedish vowels!) it is often possible to reconstruct the families as Helge Nyberg did in Vasternorrland. But for most it is possible to track vital records to about 1700. And the clergy go back to the Reformation..... 0
@@ingersundeid7948 Nu, nu, there was fighting for centuries among Denmark, Norway and Sweden over what belonged to which country- the nations weren't defined then as they are now. I know that Jämtland (ha, it let me do that one!) was under Norwegian/Danish administration for a long time and I did have people there, but I have never seen that Värmland was ever anything but in Sweden. They're an independent bunch still. 🙂 Farmor was born in Västergötland, farfar in Värmland. She never got into it with anyone who tried to say that Swedes and Norwegians didn't get along - that was "foolishness."
People thinking it's neat they are related to some monarch going that far back is especially strange, since every European alive today is also related to them, assuming there are living descendants of said monarch. It's impossible to not be given the number of humans alive then, and the number who have living descendants. Guys, we are all related to Charlemagne/Karl der Große; you can stop bringing it up at parties. Interestingly enough, we share more genetic similarity with everyone else who is European, than we do with say, a Bronze Age rando who lived in the same town one's family is from. Another reason for the relation to royalty is that, because the first son was to inherit the bulk of the estate, you also saw downward social mobility at play. That is to say, if you were the second son, from ten generations of second sons, odds are, you are now a commoner. Many of the nobility did not ever reproduce, as they joined the clergy. If you crunch the numbers, it doesn't take long for everyone to be related to some king.
DNA testing has validated my paper trail .. often to the exact person in my tree. I have nothing but royal ancestry ( they did not mix) being a direct descendant of the Virginia company on both sides. I match 5 samples of the St. Brice’s Massacre , many Merovingians, Longobards, and countless royal houses. It’s absolutely mind blowing but I do not feel “superior” in any way… it just is what it is.
Yeah. I've seen people trace back to Adam. It's ridiculous. It is interesting to know what areas my ancestors came from. I just wish I had a village name for my German line.
Does this really matter in the big picture though? As far as I know everyone with English ancestry today is a descendant of Alfred The Great, for example. Seems a bit like splitting hairs.
As a heathen I find the whole "I'm a direct descendant of _____" silly brosatru bs, because "the mill does not turn on water that has passed" As someone who grew up in a family of mormon genealogy nuts, I find the idea of taking serious medieval records about genealogy absolutely insane.
We know this type of geneologies from other places too. Look no further than for instance Jesus' different geneologies in the Bible, the Origines gentis of Rome, Carthage or the different Greek poleis, the fictive geneologies of the Germanic tribes etc.pp..
As one's research skills improve one often comes to doubt ANY inherited genealogy... most should be filed under Fantasy NOT History. "Cousin-chasing" DNA tests .. not much better. yDNA and mtDNA can provide interesting insights, but VERY few have actually tested them.
what are you talking about? :-) I am from Kjarval, Unn the Deep-minded, and Egil son of Bald-Grim. Just kidding, I know my ancestors were mainly slaves and thralls from the West and Norway - but I love and honor them all the same
Ragnar Lothbrok was a real person, he was a Danish prince. In Denmark it's possible to go far back in family history mainly because of the registrations in church books. Today there are more than 30,000 descendants of Gorm the Old living in Denmark.
The amount of people in England that have convinced themselves that they are descended from Robin Hood is quite scary. Self-delusion is a powerful force. If the man ever existed (debatable) he certainly wasn't named Locksley, and equally never lived in or near Nottingham. (I tend not to say that in Nottingham; I quite like my bones unbroken).
Yeah, all the ancestry services seem kinda dodgy. My family genealogy nuts traced us back to the 1690s in the US. We were all just normies. Still cool, though.
Swedes so they say are only 10% viking. The Danes and the English resemble the so called Vikings more then most. Of course it's said that the anglos and saxons were genetically the same as the Dan's. So they resemble absolutely no viking. Zero finito.
If I ever do a DNA test, I want to know what archaeology dig I may have descended from. Will I go all the way back to a Neanderthal? That would be worth it 😁🍀💚
Look into MyTrueAncestry, they do exactly that, tho I haven't seen any Neanderthal samples, they do have samples from the Bronze Age (4000+ years ago) and further back, depending on the region.
As an Icelander when I use Íslendingabok (online genealogy tool open for all locals) and go back about 30 generations to the Age of Settlement I am pretty much related to everyone back there from the chieftains to the lowest slave. Reliable parish records will get you 10 to 15 generations back to the early modern period. Anything before that is based on haphazard personal correspondence, annals and eventually Sagas I think.
An icelandic friend of mine told me that you guys have an app so you can check if youre related to a potential partner since your only about 300 000 people in Iceland.
That must be wild to use on a night out lol.
I find geneaology an interesting way of seeing how my own family history fits into larger patterns of migration and social and politial changes. For the most part, records are pretty decent in the Americas and Europe to get you back into the early modern period as long as you had ancestors who didn't mess with records or didn't on purpose change their identities or have super common names. Anyone named Smith or Johnson is going to have a hard time even with more recent records. I have zero interest in finding connection to royalty anyway, I just like sussing out stories.
I don't know, I met this guy who had a table set up by the mall food court who used my last name to trace my family lineage back to a royal house in Switzerland. Turns out I'm supposed to be Pope. I also bought 2square feet of land in Scotland which makes me a Lord and related to that guy from Braveheart.
😂😂😂
Me too! We're cousins! 😂
Did you get a good offer on an Eiffel Tower thrown in, too?
Hello cousin lol I'm directly related to william wallace as well. Through his sister.
I love that you mentioned how unlikely it is that certain genetic markers continue to occur after multiple hundreds, even thousands of years. I have degrees in history and biology, and I know how random assortment means that not every trait survives in the descendants. On top of your typically thorough and entertaining video, that is just the icing on the cake. Thank you!
People easily forget that more recent family history can be just as interesting to research. Through church records I can trace my paternal grandfather's family to 1606, revealing that they have been Swedish-speakers living in roughly the same area of Uusimaa for the entire period. My paternal grandmother's family history stretches to 1603 and reveals that they were originally Finnish-speakers, until the 1800's when the family moved southwest from Savonia. But the really interesting bits in her family are the various entries noted with "father unknown", which sets the speculative gears into motion. Same goes for previously unknown family-branches, which we have lost contact with due to internal fights between siblings. There is a ton of juicy drama going on among poor Finnish peasants, without the need for any royal connections. :D
I’m kinda surprised you didn’t mention how many of the early medieval genealogies also include biblical figures and various pre-Christian gods
Also stuff from the Iliad. They either claim to be descendant from Noah or from Trojans.
Appreciate the no-nonsense approach as always, thank you
In the late 90s, a popular author in Sweden wrote a series of novels about a fictional 12th century crusader from southern Sweden, Arn Magnusson. The books became hugely popular and even spawned a theme park near where the fictional Arn was born. What then happened was that people with an interest in genealogy started to attempt to connect their ancestors to Arn. I'm not sure if they genuinely hadn't realized that Arn was entirely fictional, or if they deluded themselves into thinking he was real for the "glory" of being a descendent. This was 20+ years ago, but I wouldn't be surprised if some still believe it...
I remember seeing a movie called Arn the Templar a decade or so ago. Interesting because, at the time, it was basically the story Kingdom of Heaven but Swedish. I'd never heard it was adapted from a series of books, if it's not just a coincidence.
@@Cyrathil That's the film adaptation of those books.
That's just embarrassing. Arn is said in the book to be the grandfather of Birger Jarl, all it takes (beyond just looking up the book, as it is fiction) is a few minutes of looking at who was Birger Jarl's true grandfather. (Hint: Not named Arn.)
Hey, that's kind of like how my great-great-grandfather was a famous Yorkshire rifleman named Sean Bean who fought in the Napoleonic Wars :-)
The scientific reasoning is stronger in that it's actually mathematical reasoning that if you go back beyond a certain breakpoint, then everyone alive during that period is either the ancestor to everyone alive today or no one alive today (with secluded peoples being the exception). This breakpoint has to do with population calculations, and while I'm not fully familiar with how it's done, I know that Charlemagne is one of the figures often given as "either everyone's his descendant or no one is."
You don’t even have to go back as far as Charlemagne. Some people have done the modeling to show that if you have any English ancestry you’re more than 80% likely to be descended from Edward III, and he was born almost 500 years after Charlemagne died.
Founder effect-because populations used to be smaller and (for non-pastoralists) less mobile
For what it's worth a simple exponential gives a fair idea of how this might work. My back of the envelope calculation goes like this: every generation has two parents, so the number of ancestors N you have at a given generation p away from you is N=2^p. So at generation p=1, your parents, you have 2^2=2 ancestors (your mother and father). At generation p=2, 2^2=4 ancestors, i.e. 4 grandparents. Supposing that each generation is 25 years apart (probably a conservative estimate), with the viking age being about 1000 years ago, or 1000/25=40 generations ago, you have 2^40=1,099,511,627,776 ancestors in AD1022. That's about 10 times the number of modern humans who have ever lived. So clearly there must be a lot of (hopefully distant) in-breeding, but equally, it's hard to imagine that any one person's genealogy going back that far is anything special, unless there was a *ton* of inbreeding - and I wouldn't be shouting that from the rooftops.
@@liquensrollant Going back ten generations, you would have 2 to the power 10 = 1024 eight x great grandparents, if they were all different people. Twenty generations gets you a million people, and 30 generations a billion people.
That's probably more than the population of the earth in that era, so there must be a lot of duplication. A single ancestor 30 generations ago would provide one billionth of your DNA each time he/she appears in your family tree.
Another way to look at this is that you are probably descended from almost everyone in your country, and maybe even continent, if you go back far enough.
I can only trace my ancestors back to the early 19th century. However, I am confident I had some who lived in Medieval times!
Reminds me of my aunt Viola Berge that got a letter telling her that the Berge family descended from royalty and she could get their family crest. No, all my Norwegian family knew we were all descended from peasants but her proof that this wasn't her family's crest was that there wasn't a cat on it and given the affinity for cats all of us have it couldn't be hers.
A letter from whom? I do not quite understand. Nowadays your heraldry is usually just your sword-side (patrilineal) coat of arms, making personalised quarterings is no longer really the custom. In that case your family should be directly patrilineally descended from said royalty, i.e. it basically is the same family. Now, stuff like that does actually happen. Here in Sweden we had a medieval noble family officially reintroduced to the House of Knights in 1992 - after it had been declared extinct since the 1660s - by a letter being found showing that the "last" member had a distanced son whose line had continued. This could be the case of your family, and by custom (or even law depending on the country) it would give your family the right to use that coat of arms. But it could also be a sleazy company whose business it is to fake stuff, like those websites trying to connect coats of arms to surnames in and of themselves, which is not the how it works. While it is certainly true that many nobles families have a single distinct surname, other noble families have several distinct surnames, some have several variations of a surname, sometimes one surname is used for several distinct noble families, which are sometimes not even related, sometimes a noble family has an extremely common surname, the bearers of which the the vast vast vast majority are not noble, which is especially common in Anglophone countries.
Everyone is descended from royalty at some point. My family was 99% farmers from northern Sweden, but it turns out we were descended from the now extinct noble clan Blix, and they in turn were descended from Norwegian nobility who came to Sweden in the 14th century. These Norwegian nobles have a clear line back to Harald Fairhair, who no doubt has millions of grandchildren walking around today.
Mathematically speaking, the people in Scandinavia and England during the viking age are so old that you can say that "if their direct lineage survives to the present day, and you are of english or Scandinavian decent, you are related to that person in the past."
The identical ancestors generation for English or Scandinavian people, its coming up around the time of the late viking age. This generation is called the identical ancestors generation because those of us alive today are related to everyone in that generation by direct desent (except those who's lineage died out)
I might just be high but I'm struggling to understand what you mean by the first paragraph
not interested exactly in specific people but i do have an interest in understanding what my ancestors lives mightve been like. i find it more personally valuable to recognize their reality and the hard work and struggle that eventually came to me. im...made of all that..
I just love the sound of the language and the myths
I always appreciate your frankness and emphasis on reliable evidence without simply spouting speculation Dr. Crawford! It's refreshing and, unfortunately, rather rare on these UA-cam channels. Thank you for sharing the information!
For the scientific reason, I recommend Adam Rutherford -
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived
We actually have a few families in Norway who can trace their history back to the 12th-14th century and probably a little earlier. There are, for example, the Galtung (meaning wild boar) and Bolt families. The challenge, however, is that the Danes, as a consequence of the Dano-Norwegian Realm (1536-1814), tried to eliminate the old Norwegian noble families for political reasons. Male members of the families were killed or simply disappeared so that Danish noble families could take over their domains in Norway. Today's descendants of the oldest Norwegian noble families are therefore usually descendants of women. In addition, the Black Death (approx. 1350) led to approx. 2/3 of Norway's population died and there is therefore little information from that time.
As you point out Jackson, it is usually only more or less famous people/families that we know from bygone times. These were rich people, nobles, kings, poets, writers, priests etc. It was only in the 15th and 16th centuries that ordinary people could get a lasting legacy as a consequence of, for example, a position as chief mining inspector in a copper/silver mine. Records in reports and accounts were then signed and the surname, title and position thus secured for posterity.
In Iceland anyone can basically trace themselves to anyone since settlement. Decode Genetics created an online genealogy database from all the records where anyone can look up how they're related to any living or dead Icelander since 870. It's purpose was mostly for genetic research. Basically all living Icelanders are 10th cousins at most and anyone can petty much trace their lineage to almost any Icelander in the Viking age, assuming they had a surviving lineage. Sources like Landnámabók also do recite the lineages of many settlers further back to kings and such, including Ragnar Loðbrók.
@@meginna8354 As far as I understand, the vast majority of Icelanders are of Norwegian descent if you go back far enough. There was, however, some female admixture from the British Isles (which the Vikings brought from there), but otherwise the vast majority of the first Icelanders came from western Norway.
There was a lot of dubious genealogy done in Norway in the late 19th and early 20th century, and many of those dubious lines are still repeated today, and are rarely doubted, because they're repeated so many places.
We must remember that genealogical descent and genetic descent are not the same thing. In each generation there is a chance of adoption or false parentage that may or may not be recorded and these chances vary over time. Even if one can document a genealogy what are the chances that a particular ancestor's blood flows in your veins?
Apparently the genetic line does die out after so many generations. I only learned this when Richard III was dug up out of that car park, because the person they used to validate the DNA was in his 50s - his children couldn't do it because he was the very last of the genetic line. I suppose it makes sense really... the blood gets more diluted over the generations.
Exactly! When I saw Russ in my genetic makeup, oh boy was my dad super excited. He's a rip-roaring Rusophile, everything from Russia is the Bestest Evarr.
I took great joy I pointing at the REST of it and telling him, "Dad... it's largely Scandinavian... The Russ we got is *probably* from a slave or two."
The pouting was glorious.
@@paulaunger3061 The genes are still there, some parts of our DNA are much more stable than others but it can become hard to distinguish the more it gets spliced.
@@SoulSoundMuisc Or not. They may have been or claim to have been from the early settlers of what is now Ukraine! Kyiv was founded by them as was Novgorod. It does help a bunch to know some history with our research.
I like the modern Íslendingabók(yes, the icelandic dating app /s ), using genealogies, church records and sagas to trace back the genealogies of Icelanders. I once took part in a study done by DeCode (Íslensk erfðagreining) and if memory serves that on my fathers side I am allegedly descendant of the brother of Sæmundur Fróði (Sæmundr the Learned) (1056 - 1133).
And in Íslendingabók i managed to trace my fathers family line to the late 700's (780'ish) Scotland to a man named Baldvin. No idea if that is true, cool if true, no skin off my back if not.
As someone who has taught Intro to Family History 101 quite a few times…THANK YOU.
Just this morning as I was reviewing commentary on some Sagas and decided similarly that if in person they could not determine a royal line, why ought we believe any of it? It was a great, riveting story where I just HAD to know what happened to the chick. Ok, sorta spoiler here, but The person in question was a German lady who asserted that she was some royal descendant who was long thought dead. The actual "princess" had several reliable, firsthand witnesses of her demise, yet, the popular folk of Norway wanted to believe that this was really the princess. The pretender was put to death, but still the majority believed her and so " sainted" her. Great story! But, as previously commented, I was left pondering what was used to determine the truth, and if they struggled to make sense of it how on earth could we? (noticing how closely so many well-intending and seemingly researched genealogies matched the Sagas so perfectly,) These sagas had to have been used as a source for many personal histories... but, even the commentary gave the feeling that this was a book of gossips, and based on a truth probably, but maybe only loosely.
I was born into the Mormon faith, which as a culture as well as religion is well known to actively pursue genealogy records. Although it's not my chosen belief system today, it's likely this has greatly influenced my interest in my family lines and it's a fascinating pursuit. Results of Ancestry DNA supported the records found and has my DNA connected to mostly Scandinavia, Scotland, Iceland and the UK. As far as any royal blood, it's a toss of the dice in my view. It really does get pretty messy when you think of how many children were conceived through, well, messing around. It is what it is. After many generations, the DNA does change, and for humankind, that's mostly to the advantage of the species, or hopefully, anyway. For example, studies of ancient Norwegians showed they were plagued with intestinal parasites, but over time, their bodies changed to combat this and although found to be successful at that for the most part, the trade off, so to speak, was that the Norwegian population and also a considerable part of the Scandinavian modern day population now has a great propensity for emphysema and lung disease. I have COPD, so can't say that I am a benefactor of that particular evolutionary process. And so it goes.
Love the authentic approach you have! In this point in history we are all mutts so tracing our DNA we can only go back so far. The past is a good point of reference and we can learn from it but it's better to live in the present and continue evolving & improving! From san Francisco I'm wishing you.. All the best!
Norwegian (amateur) genealogist here. You are quite right. We have documents that can trace lineages back to the 1700s, sometimes to the 1600s. Before that we have to rely on less and less reliable documentation, and the more generations you go back the more chances of errors. I can trace my own lineage back to Harald Hårfagre, Gorm, Gange-Rolf and so on, but the chances of those lineages being correct are pretty slim. We do have ongoing projects trying to document male (y-dna) and female (mt-dna) lineages farther back (which is possible), but you can't know much about these distant relatives (not even their names) using this technique, only that two people with their DNA tested have a common ancestor an estimated number of generations back. We Norwegians are much more closely related to our American cousins than to our Icelandic ones, and even the American connection is often hard to document.
I'm pretty sure both Haraldr Hárfagri and Göngu Hrólfr have no documented lineage, and are only mentioned or referenced by authors like Snorri, making it somewhat unclear on whether they even existed.
@@meginna8354 Various Icelandic sources (cf. Chapter 4 of Orkneyinga Saga, Chapter 309 of Landnámabók, Chapter 9 of Knýtlinga saga and Chapter 24 of the Saga of Harald Fairhair), as well as Chapter 210 of the 13th century Fagrskinna, confirm that Hrólfr aka ‘Gǫngu-Hrólfr’ Ragnvaldsson, the first ruler of Normandy, was a son of Ragnvald Eysteinsson ‘the Wise’, Earl of Møre (Norway). Earl Ragnvald is said to have been a son of Eystein ‘Glumra’ (‘the Noisy’) Upplendingejarl and Aseda Ragnvaldsdotter, a daughter of Ragnvald ‘Heidumhære’.
I've heard statistics that say that once you go back about a thousand years, you're basically descended from the entirety of Europe who still have descendents today. Nothing specific, though.
I read that too, but it doesn't make any sense. Icelanders have Icelandic ancestors for a thousand years, with little added, and few emigrations. Italians have Italian ancestors for a thousand years, with a bit more people coming in and out. But I doubt a person from northern Iceland and one from a remote valley in Italy necessarily have a common ancestor in the last thousand years.
@@Aethuviel It's more of an average. It think the percentage is 80%. Plus those immigrants and outside influences connect in.
@@Aethuviel Answers in Genesis has a series of videos on the idea
The Saga of the Volsungs is related to the German Nibelungenlied, an epic poem about Siegfried, Kriemhild, and Brunhild. Notably in this story Siegfried is from the Netherlands, Kriemhild is from Worms, and Brunhild is from Iceland.
The poem is kind of Germany's Beowulf, except even older, and it (along with the Saga of the Volsungs) speaks of a deep story at the taproot of the Germanic peoples, perhaps even of the Proto-Indo-Europeans themselves. For those who read German, I can recommend the modernising translation by Karl Simrock; it was written in 1827 using language that was old-fashioned at the time, but it remains quite a bit more readable than Shakespeare for a modern English speaker, and the meter is very charming.
I dispute this. Last I checked (literally just now) Nibelungenleid's written form is 400 or so years younger than Beowulf's.
Not to mention, Beowulf's oral tradition goes back as far as Volsunga Saga's (when it wasn't a "saga" yet.)
Our ancestors are the reason we are here right now, and even if we do not have to like all of them, we owe it to them to remember them. This is why preserving these genealogies was sacred back then, and still is for many of us. It is disrespectful to forget your ancestors. Who cares if someone makes a mistake sometimes? At least they have tried to find out, and become interested in their history.
I have been working on my family's history for many years, of course I was able to delve even deeper these last couple of years. Having deep roots in England, Scotland, Wales, Holland, Denmark, France and Germany there's bound to be some Viking in there, but of course only the nobility and aristocracy kept family records, so I can only go so far, but being curious I wanted to see if any historical Vikings might be there, and up pops Ragnar Lothbrok, Thorfinn 'the Skull Splitter' and King Cunut. But knowing that the records kept were written mostly by Christian Monks and through the saga's, it's definitely a stretch to believe it's accurate, I definitely take it with a grain of salt. What I like about finding historical figures in my tree is that I can research those people and learn more about the period, places and the events that were happening at that time in history (which affected everyone), it makes me feel more connected to my ancestors, as well as having the knowledge that I'm more closely related to half the population of Europe than I previously knew! Knowing more about your family's history, you know more about our shared history.
Went through this myself some time ago when I was interested in finding out more about my heritage, naturally I came across heraldry and thought it was until I found out that there's no guarantee that any symbol relates to your family line specifically. Low behold when I went to visit my grandpas house I saw a giant heraldic poster hung up and everyone was excited about it. I said nothing.
Worse still is the fact that because we're Mexican, a surname is especially a bad tool to trace ancestry because in many cases we may have inherited it through slavery. Still though, study into my surname eventually led me to learning about the Goths and ancient Rome so It wasn't all a loss.
Last person in my family to use patronymic (in addition to farm name) was my great grandfather born 1917, Møre og Romsdal.
In the 90s my grandfather finally finished his leg work on our family genealogy. He said it was as accurate as he could get, given so many records were lost in WWII. He picked the trail up though as best he could.
We've got some nobility in our past. Sure. He stopped tracking back when the information dried up. There's some Frank in there, and that's where it ends. He said we were lucky to get back that far.
I did one of those tests and there's some Frank all right, a little Russ, some Dane and Norwegian. No fancy names, no "your family was royalty!" nonsense... and I wouldn't have believed if it had implied as much.
Edit: the only nobility we have is disgraced and had to flee juuuuust before the French Revolution.
I'm not really interested in genealogy. I was told this story when I was a young boy: My great-great-etc grandfather was a soldier from southern Sweden, Småland I think it was. He fought in the 30-years war and survived. As wages he got a plot of land in Finland (then called Östland, Eastern Land (of Sweden)) and that's why I was born in Finland. I have no way to prove this (maybe I do, but could I be bothered?). My paternal grandparents were Swedish-speaking but as they moved to an area that was totally Finnish-speaking (except them) they had to learn Finnish. They were nowhere rich, nor they had any notable ancestors, just normal people. I love it this way.
I have lots of more recent Scandinavian ancestors I didn't even know about until a few years ago. But doesn't have as much bite as being connected to Orkney or Dublin, royalty or not. That is why I started in on your channel so don't knock it ;-) Genealogy research can be devastating to living family members. Getting my DNA done was essential to connecting to unknown relatives, that got me past the Family Bible though.
Before I finish watching the video, I’d think the British royal family (and anyone who is connected to them in the last 900 years) has a good claim to Viking descent through the dukes of Normandy
The Windsor family are German, are they not?
Not of course through any male line for the British Royals , the dynasty after the Normans, the Angivans was founded by a Frenchman, the next the Tudors by a Welsh descentant, the next the Stuarts by a Scot the next the Hannovarians by Hannovarians the Current Sax Gotha Coburg is also self explanatory except they call themselves Winsor.
I kinda found out the opposite. When correcting my maternal grandmother's line on Ancestry,I found out from her 2nd cousin that I'm related to Jefferson Davis,the president of the Confederacy. He acted like I was supposed to be proud of that fact. I also share ancestors in common with FDR and Daniel Boone. Crazy stuff to dig up for sure.
You may not be a scientist,but you're with them,as they also care about what can be shown to be verifiable,demonstrated,and concordant with reality. Respectable people.
I can trace my ancestry back to Woden, i mean that's great and all he is the king of Asgard (or whatever the A-S equivalent is) but over here I can barely manage my bills, so how does this help me? Should I ask grandpa for a loan?
I was doing research for some short stories, when I accidentally discovered, that my ancester 42 generations back were Audur the Deepminded, Norwegian born christian settler in Iceland and former queen in Dublin/Dyflinn. On one hand I don't believe it, but it's a good story and it had me hooked on genealogy. On the other hand, I'm pretty much convinced, that my ancesters actually were vikings - or were living in what is called the viking age - as my DNA tells me to be 100 percent Nordic - 93 percent Scandinavian and 7 percent Finnish. My mother was Danish, my father is Norwegian with Forest Finnish ancesters (Finns immigrating to Norway and Sweden in the 17th century; Finnskogen had a big - maybe the biggest - population of Forest Finns). Another thing to consider: It is correct, that far back ancesters only hold a tiny piece of us, but we wouldn't be us, if they hadn't been them.
Fascinating vid. I wonder how much weight people in the mediaeval period actually put on who their ancestors actually were? A friend once traced my mother's family tree back to the 1550s - and that's where it stops, because prior to a law requiring every English subject to be baptised into the Protestant religion, nobody thought the births, deaths and marriages of peasants worth recording. I'm impressed the direct line was actually unbroken - friend did mine while on a break from his own, which had stopped in the early 19th century due to someone having an unmarried mother.
I suspect the modern obsession is informed by ideas of blood destiny - romances about lost and secret heirs to thrones, rightful kings, etc. One 19th century academic claimed that Queen Victoria was descended from Odin - and Lord Burghley had his family tree 'traced' back to.... King Arthur! :D
I wish one day you would have a channel in Spanish, or your channel with subtitles. I like what you do and there is little content on the subject in Spanish.
I had a good laugh with this video. I have a DNA match on Ancestry who has a family tree with over 60,000 people. In exploring this tree trying to find the common relative, this person's tree goes back to Saint Olav, Ragnar, Rollo and beyond, all the way to the Norse Gods. It didn't take long to find flaws in the lineage to show that it was bogus. Alas, I'm not related to royalty or the gods. Just a descendant of farmers and fishermen, which beats royalty any day.
My grandmother and aunt were very into genealogy and have researched much of our recent family tree within the U.S., going back in some cases to the 1600s. I have some ancestry from Switzerland, where the church keep very good, detailed records for several hundred years and my ancestors lived in the same cluster of villages during those several hundred years, so that line of my family can be traced back very far compared to the rest... All the way back to around the late 1400s. But knowing, from their research, how few records there are earlier than that, I would be highly skeptical of anything that tried to tell me I was related to specific people in the middle ages.
Genealogical tracing back to royalty or major figures gets even less meaningful when you consider the maths of it. With each generation you go back, the number of ancestors doubles and the potential pool of candidates gets smaller as you go further back, because there were fewer people on the planet. My partner's uncle traced her and her brother back to William the Conqueror and he did a different route for each of them, specifically to demonstrate this.
Good job and for the most part agree. Today when we think the "Royalty" or Royal families and houses, it's very different from the earlier times & in some ways that's a very good thing.
Even though they had great wealth it was more about controlling power over others and tons of support in doing so. Today we see all of these huge places but need to realize those happened over centuries. In other words for example, when you look at Windsor castle it look very different than it would have in the time of William the conqueror's.
As far as proving decent from them, a good number may be but what does that mean for us today?
How we treat each other is much more important.
Thanks for your channel and so cool how you provide a good one for leaning more about those earlier languages. More could be said but for now have to go.
Take care & thanks again
As a fellow crawford I can say that we are most likely loosely related. If you put a picture of me, you, and my dad side by side the similarities would be obvious. Grew up in a cowboy family myself so it gets even more similar the way we dress. I think it would be interesting to see how related me and you are with a shared last name and similar features.
What's your take on the genealogies given in the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE and their possible connections with genealogical information from Norse and Icelandic sources?
My dad needed to give up on his family research precisely because of the lack of surnames. In the 18th century there was just a long line of "George, son of George".x) Though Yrjö Yrjönpoika in Finnish.
My mom had better luck with the line where there's a soldier in the 17th century, because soldiers were given surnames.
For the DNA tests, so far I think I'm best satisfied with the general mapping of the Finnish DNA: 95% standard European mix, 5% Siberian. From my parents research I know I have some Polish and possibly German or Dutch ancestry (via the aforementioned soldier and the woman he married), but that's just a tiny bit, and doesn't really change anything compared to the general Finnish DNA profile.
There are some American families that have books of genealogy going all the way back to the Puritans. For example the Strong family descended from Elder John Strong has a book listing the complete descendants of Elder John Strong right up to the 20th century. And when you run into royalty you can get deep veins of genealogy. They often have to be checked because genealogy was propaganda justifying the rule of kings.
My grandmother was a Cain/Caine for the Isle of Man where a DNA study for Ydna that is passed down via male dna from fathers to sons. And they found the dna for Cain members, Keene family and a couple other family names, all had one male ancestor, of Norway decent, about 1000 a.d. give or take a few hundred years.
Believed to be one of the descendants of the Crovan dynasty. Started by Godred Crovan. I wish they could find one of the family members graves so they could get dna from them, so it could be proven or dismissed.
I actually did trace my ancestry to Thor and Odin. Although it's a fun tidbit, it proves his point that people sometimes embellished their ancestry.
The math is pretty simple. The number of ancestors you have (ignoring any incest) increases exponentially with generation. It’s just 2^n with n being the number of generations you go back. You have 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, 16 great greats, and so on. You only have to go back 500 or 600 years to have more theoretical ancestors than the entire population of Europe at the time.
Of course in reality there is inter family marriages even of cousins that make this assumption far off from reality, but the implication is clear. With enough effort it is not at all hard to find that we are all related to someone of import several hundred years ago - it’s basically guaranteed.
@Fr-h WLH True, marriage between different classes and nationalities would be uncommon, but dalliances would be more common though generally unrecorded.
I got one for you, some of my "royal lines" trace back to Jesus Christ and another gose to Odin. They did like to make connections that bettered their claim to the throne.
The Odin relationship is actually believed as being of veracity by a number of archaeologists (though obviously according to them Odin was an actual King originally).
Personally, I find geneology searching can lead people to construe some pretty bizarre narratives about themselves and their family.
More specifically, finding out that you have a distant relative from three generations back, who is from another country, often feels like a cheap way to feel special if your background is considered quite vanilla by other people. Like if your great-great grandfather on your mother's side was French or German or Polish, I have found some people who think that's reason enough to "claim" that culture as their own. But I find this to be a very inauthentic process, because the claimant often has no connection to that country's modern culture or people, or particularly language, and therefore have no lived experiences or connections beyond wanting to feel special.
Like if you'd spent your entire life in England or America and then got dropped into modern France or Germany or Spain, you're not gonna suddenly feel like you "belong" just because your distant relative was from there. There's way more relevant factors at play. It's the sort of bullcrap I see when celebrities, like Lewis Hamilton, refer to South Africa as "the motherland" because of the colour of his skin.
That monthy python sketch you mention brought up the pain every Icelandic School child feels when having to go through those blasted sagas in school. XD
Actually I don't know how the Icelandic curriculum is today, been 25 years since I was in school, but I remember having to remember who was son of this guy and then son of that guy then son of yet another guy and me just going "how is this relevant??!!!!! i don't care who his great-great-great-great-great granddad was, I just want to get to the fighting."
On topic of the video, I don't believe my own genealogy when it goes past the 16-17th century, I might joke about being related to this and that famous guy from the sagas, but whether it's true is not something I really care about.
It has been postulated that all people native to Europe are descended from all the people that had children in Europe a 1000 year back. That is, it takes about 1000 years max that all people are related. For example, it would be highly unlikely that a native European would NOT be a descendant of Charlemagne. Especially in Iceland with a tiny population, everyone is descended from the first Icelanders. It's pointless to try and make yourself unique with genealogies when you're all the same.
When you go back far enough most people are related
Just a heads up. I'm not sure the grimfrost link in the description actually includes the affiliate code. From my view, the ?aff=183 part is no included in the hyperlink. I could be wrong though. Thanks for all the information.
I have been able to tentatively trace my ancestors back to minor nobility in the middle ages, which is unsurprising really given the further back the more families you are woven into and the chances of one of them having a knighthood or baronage is not insignificant. The family themselves at the time claimed to be a cadet branch of the original Seymour family (Jane Seymour and all that) but historians cast doubt on that, even back in the day families liked to boast of connections that made them look more important. I mean who not want to be related to the most powerful familiy in England in bluff King Hal's day?
There's a classic section in my family's genealogy. The records look reasonable back to about 1100 ish... Then when you get to a point where the claim says Ivar Halfdansson - Halfdan Sveidasson - Sveidi Heytirsson - Heytir Gorsson - Gor etc... whatever.
The thing with this section is that there's about a 100 - 200 year age gap in their supposed births for each generation. So either I'm descended from some really long lived dudes or the genealogy is a bit... iffy.
Incidentally, much like the rest of Europe, I'm descended from Charlemagne.
Dear Doctor Crawford, you are right. However, there are a lot genealogies that go very far back in history, most of them being very well documented. For instance, there are families that can trace back their roots for more a 1000 years, with every generation recorded in historical documents. Most of the aristocratic families have this type of records. But as soon as you get into the saga genealogies everything turns crazy. For instance, the Rurikids of Rus' can all trace their root back to Rurik, but nobody knows who Rurik really was. This is why this families are more interested to look for scandinavian connection using the well documented maternal lines. Even so, as soon as you go back in time, it is imposible not to get into myth. However, it is pretty easy to make connection to the scandinavian lines back to 9th century. With documents, graves, and genealogical data. There were also a lot of genetical studies, comparing genetical material from known graves of ancestors with modern genetic material of their descendents. For sure the sagas and other extreme genealogies are not so reliable, but combined with historical data and genetical material could be very interesting. All the best! Great topic.
If you take the tree of ancestors each of us has - there is no chance that we are *not* related to somebody in Scandinavia ca 800
So - the people have found a line of evidence to their great ancestors
What people need to remember about popular genealogy sites, it’s that someone entered the information in a system somewhere. Where did they get that information? What was their source? I was following my husband’s line one time, because it just kept going. It led back to Joseph of Arimathea. There were dozens of entries with this same information, so it’s got to be correct, right? Well, they all used the same source. “The Da Vinci Code”.
To be fair The best source for geneologies going preety far back is church records or parish records ala marriage contracts and marriage records , which in Scandinavia is harder due to Protestant destruction of Catholic land and monasteries ( which also happened in England) , and that it’s conversion was preety late ( dr. Crawford correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t local parishes and the church more broadly was preety decent at basically record keeping) , aka most people would marry in church so having some contract or evidence marriage was done or bautism ( aka records)
Doesn't help that people who say they're descended from a noble ancestor always pick the upper film of famousness, like Charlemagne or Henry VIII. I've never come across someone make the more plausible claim that they're descended from, idunno, the margrave of north Strassburg in 1620.
My 5th GGF was Tomys Swartwout, he was from Friesland, his wife was from Norway. He was born is 1607, and his wife around the same time. I know this because they were a pretty prominent family in The Netherlands and New Amsterdam(New York). My mother has just one percent of Norwegian dna, I have none. So you are right, I only have 5 regions in Europe. Genealogies for royalty was kept track of by the Roman Catholic, and later the Church of England. I did trace a branch of the family, my father's who were descended from Sigurd "The Mighty". 2 yarl of Orkney. But he was probably known about because of his battle with the Scottish earl of Orkney. It's the same with all these fake "Coat of Arms". If you weren't royalty, you didn't have one. So, you are right as usual. Disappointing, but right.
I've done extensive ancestry work since I was 11 years old; 21 years later and a DNA test, I know I'm not related to any royalty. I do feel as though some of my ancestors were definitely farmers, smiths, hunters, and warriors because that's what I feel in my own heart. Also just got your Poetic Edda translation, it's really good! I know you're a trusted source when even pagans are putting your book in their videos...just sayin'.
Everyone is descended from royalty at some point, as everyone is descended from slaves.
@@Aethuviel not everyone is descended from royalty, highly wishful thinking. Besides what is royalty...nothing.
I'm Icelandic and can, as all Icelanders, use Íslendingabók (the genealogical Icelandic database, which you, Jackson Crawford, probably know of) to trace my antecedents. It of course relies on how interested Icelanders have always been in genealogy and how well it is documented in Iceland also in the case of "common" people (it helps how few we are, and have been, and isolated in the past). I can go back generation to generation to the 8th century. I am for example (according to Íslendingabók) direct descendant of Egill Skallagrímsson (30 generations) and Snorri Sturluson (24 generations) and the name of every ancestor in that line is listed (and additional information e.g. date of birth and death) and the source of the information for every ancestor is also listed. You can of course decide how well you trust each source listed. Wherefrom the information comes, is in fact listed for every person in Íslendingabók regardless in what century the person was/is born. It is common for an Icelander to be able to trace back like that to the Landnámsmenn (settlers) and famous persons in the Sagas (and not famous). When I use Íslendingabók, I'm usually more interested in my genealogy last 200 years, after all most Icelanders are related going 8 or 9 generations back. But it can be fun to throw in famous names in Icelandic history and see ok, I'm related to that person in that way. Also, if you meet a new person (Icelandic) you can look up in Íslendingabók whether and how you are related, generation through generation. It is that easy in Iceland. This is obviously based on informations registered in Iceland so you can't for example expect to find information about your ancestors before they moved to Iceland or after they moved from Iceland.
Just for fun, here is my thread in Íslendingabók to Egill Skallagrímsson (30 generations): Egill Skallagrímsson, Þorgerður Egilsdóttir, Þorbjörg Ólafsdóttir, Ingveldur Vermundardóttir, Þorgerður Yngvildardóttir, Yngveldur Hauksdóttir, Snorri Húnbogason, Narfi Snorrason, Snorri Narfason, Narfi Snorrason, Snorri Narfason, Ormur Snorrason, Guttormur Ormsson, Loftur Guttormsson, Ólöf Loftsdóttir, Þorleifur Björnsson, Guðný Þorleifsdóttir, Sigríður Grímsdóttir, Einar Magnússon, Rögnvaldur Einarsson, Árni Rögnvaldsson, Guðrún Árnadóttir, Guðný Þorsteinsdóttir, Guðrún Erlendsdóttir, Jón Stefánsson, Jón Jónsson, Pálína Jónsdóttir, Magnea Herborg Jónsdóttir, Anna Björg Sigurðardóttir, Guðrún Magnea Karlsdóttir and me Anna Herborg Traustadóttir.
I had just read about that database in Adam Rutherford's A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. From that I gather that a lot of Icelanders have had their DNA sequenced, which could serve to validate or refute some relationships
Great Vid!
I dug a bit into my family history, and found it was best not to dig to deep. Quite a bloody lot of border reavers.
Familysearch is good if you care to do these genealogies. I could reliably trace certain lineages to the Renaissance. It's a free non profit and relies on people scouring through public records with you to find the most authentic connections
I figure my relatives jumped ship and stole stuff or I wouldn’t be alive.
My Neanderthal genes are ones at not many have though. I still don’t know my family name, perhaps Thag! Famous for being on the business end of a Thsgomizer.
The Far Side rules dude
didn't that take Thag out of the gene pool? Or perhaps Thag had kids before getting thagged.
I misread the title and thought he was just gonna distrust WOMEN
😂😂
You're related to Andrew Jackson? How?
Historians (or "historians") had a bad habit of shoehorning people into the same family tree as someone royal or noble. It's happened at least twice in my family. I am a Spencer, but most likely not one of *those* Spencers. Heck, I can't even be sure that the last somewhat confirmable Spencer in my tree didn't just take on the name for the prestige - the trail ran cold. I can't find mention of his parents anywhere.
The other side of the family paid for someone to figure out their history in the mid 1800's. The man tied the family to a minor noble family out of France. I got suspicious when one of the patriarchs lived to be 104 in the 1500's and had 30 children. Major red flags. More digging lead me to find that this "historian" was known to just make stuff up and take people's money.
Genealogy sites are great, but they can never be nuanced enough once you get back several hundred years, sooner in other parts of the world. You really need to read the source materials for yourself.
I still enjoy finding stories about people who might have been related to me. It gives me snapshots of life in the past and how far we've come.
Would like to point out that at least in Sweden, maybe all of Scandinavia, church records are pretty accurate to about 1500. Sometimes a farm record will give an entire list of family members who lived there. The clergy kept their own genealogies as they went along and in some cases to the late 1400's. In England when you can find a match with a particular family and wills survive, you may be able to accurately connect there also. Think it was Ancestry's DNA service, when they first began, told me we are descended from the "ancestors of the Vikings" so it indicated a connection without being specific. Since part of my family were in western Sweden and DNA otherwise show a link with the people of eastern Norway, it probably makes sense. Do have to be careful of published trees though. They make sense up to a point but again lack of good documents of any sort make them suspect.
In Norway, the oldest records are from 1623. And that is one single church records. Most have been lost over time, even going back before 1800 isdifficult.
Btw, until the 1800th century, West Sweden was Norway. It was stolen from us. All the area from the present border and all the way down to Gothenburg was Norwegian. (And the same goes for Jemtland and Herjedalen).
@@ingersundeid7948 Appreciate learning that, Inger. I should have qualified the comment about 1500 for Sweden, since there was a fire in Stockholm Archives in 1686 that destroyed most of what was gathered there. But farm records and mantalslangd (sorry this computer won't let me use the proper Swedish vowels!) it is often possible to reconstruct the families as Helge Nyberg did in Vasternorrland. But for most it is possible to track vital records to about 1700. And the clergy go back to the Reformation.....
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@@ingersundeid7948 Nu, nu, there was fighting for centuries among Denmark, Norway and Sweden over what belonged to which country- the nations weren't defined then as they are now. I know that Jämtland (ha, it let me do that one!) was under Norwegian/Danish administration for a long time and I did have people there, but I have never seen that Värmland was ever anything but in Sweden. They're an independent bunch still. 🙂 Farmor was born in Västergötland, farfar in Värmland. She never got into it with anyone who tried to say that Swedes and Norwegians didn't get along - that was "foolishness."
Can't claim President Jackson, we can claim Marry Todd and a few riders with Morgan.
People thinking it's neat they are related to some monarch going that far back is especially strange, since every European alive today is also related to them, assuming there are living descendants of said monarch. It's impossible to not be given the number of humans alive then, and the number who have living descendants. Guys, we are all related to Charlemagne/Karl der Große; you can stop bringing it up at parties.
Interestingly enough, we share more genetic similarity with everyone else who is European, than we do with say, a Bronze Age rando who lived in the same town one's family is from.
Another reason for the relation to royalty is that, because the first son was to inherit the bulk of the estate, you also saw downward social mobility at play. That is to say, if you were the second son, from ten generations of second sons, odds are, you are now a commoner. Many of the nobility did not ever reproduce, as they joined the clergy. If you crunch the numbers, it doesn't take long for everyone to be related to some king.
If you think the clergy didn't reproduce, you might want to think again; it's just that the parentage wouldn't have been recorded.
DNA testing has validated my paper trail .. often to the exact person in my tree. I have nothing but royal ancestry ( they did not mix) being a direct descendant of the Virginia company on both sides. I match 5 samples of the St. Brice’s Massacre , many Merovingians, Longobards, and countless royal houses. It’s absolutely mind blowing but I do not feel “superior” in any way… it just is what it is.
Yeah. I've seen people trace back to Adam. It's ridiculous. It is interesting to know what areas my ancestors came from. I just wish I had a village name for my German line.
Does this really matter in the big picture though? As far as I know everyone with English ancestry today is a descendant of Alfred The Great, for example. Seems a bit like splitting hairs.
As a heathen I find the whole "I'm a direct descendant of _____" silly brosatru bs, because "the mill does not turn on water that has passed"
As someone who grew up in a family of mormon genealogy nuts, I find the idea of taking serious medieval records about genealogy absolutely insane.
And then, of course, we have ll the people whose mother's cheated on their dads
We know this type of geneologies from other places too. Look no further than for instance Jesus' different geneologies in the Bible, the Origines gentis of Rome, Carthage or the different Greek poleis, the fictive geneologies of the Germanic tribes etc.pp..
As one's research skills improve one often comes to doubt ANY inherited genealogy... most should be filed under Fantasy NOT History. "Cousin-chasing" DNA tests .. not much better. yDNA and mtDNA can provide interesting insights, but VERY few have actually tested them.
The Y and mt tests seem very expensive. Would love to do them,as thats exactly where my brick walls are.
Ye olde milkman is your multiple greats grandfather
what are you talking about? :-) I am from Kjarval, Unn the Deep-minded, and Egil son of Bald-Grim. Just kidding, I know my ancestors were mainly slaves and thralls from the West and Norway - but I love and honor them all the same
Can someone explain to me how blood transfusions affect people’s genealogy and self-constructed identity?
Blood transfusions have no affect on genealogy. Red blood cells last only a few months. The are constantly being renewed in the bone marrow.
@@kirkjacobson4008 also the RBC don't have nuclear DNA. I do wish people would stop referring to "bloodlines"
Ragnar Lothbrok was a real person, he was a Danish prince. In Denmark it's possible to go far back in family history mainly because of the registrations in church books. Today there are more than 30,000 descendants of Gorm the Old living in Denmark.
The amount of people in England that have convinced themselves that they are descended from Robin Hood is quite scary. Self-delusion is a powerful force. If the man ever existed (debatable) he certainly wasn't named Locksley, and equally never lived in or near Nottingham. (I tend not to say that in Nottingham; I quite like my bones unbroken).
Yeah, all the ancestry services seem kinda dodgy.
My family genealogy nuts traced us back to the 1690s in the US. We were all just normies. Still cool, though.
Swedes so they say are only 10% viking. The Danes and the English resemble the so called Vikings more then most. Of course it's said that the anglos and saxons were genetically the same as the Dan's.
So they resemble absolutely no viking. Zero finito.
🙃
If I ever do a DNA test, I want to know what archaeology dig I may have descended from. Will I go all the way back to a Neanderthal? That would be worth it 😁🍀💚
Look into MyTrueAncestry, they do exactly that, tho I haven't seen any Neanderthal samples, they do have samples from the Bronze Age (4000+ years ago) and further back, depending on the region.
I'm very proud to say that my family's genealogical records include Odin himself
STOP UNDERMINING MY GRAND DELUSIONS. RAGNAR IS MY GRANDPAPI