When I began dating the man who would become my husband, he corrected my spelling of his last name.
“It’s not S-T-E-W-A-R-T,” he said. “It’s S-T-U-A-R-T. The ‘royal’ spelling.”
Without anything more than a gut feeling, my husband has long believed he is descended from Mary, Queen of Scots. It’s been a "thing" in our marriage, he pointing out the royal-ness of his last name, me countering with the virtues of being a full-blooded Italian.
In a twisted way, I feel more royal than he; there is, after all, a German play about the last days of Mary, Queen of Scots, titled “Maria Stuart.”
So, for all the years I’ve known my husband, I’ve had fun with the royal thing, poking gently at his belief (or, maybe, hope?) that royal blood flows in his veins. I maintain that I’d much rather be descended from people who make stuff — art and opera, wine and love — than off-with-their-heading royals. I trump his Mary, Queen of Scots with my Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Sophia Loren.
But so what if I have the upper hand in fashion sense and music, in cooking ability and drama? As a second-generation American, I grew up with an abridged family, while my husband has this faded photo of four generations of Stuart men, taken when he was a baby in his great-grandfather’s arms. He has photos of relatives from back even farther than that. Heck, he can go to cemeteries in mid-Michigan and visit the graves of relatives stretching way back, great- and great-great grandparents, and aunts and uncles who owned and worked the land.
I envy his deep American roots, which spread far and wide. We didn’t learn just how far and wide, though, until our son fell in love with “Who Do You Think You Are?” The NBC series follows celebrities as they track down their ancestors and find out amazing things about their heritage.
“Please, please, can we join Ancestry.com,” my son pleaded last year. The online genealogical community sponsors the series.
The cost of membership was something to consider, but the chance to build a family history for my son — the only child of older parents — won out. Well, that and my curiosity to see if I was descended from Leonardo da Vinci.
So, I began traveling the path connecting billion-year-old carbon to my funny little boy. The tools available to pajama-clad, living-room genealogical sleuths through Ancestry.com are breathtaking, and I was able to do a ton of family tree building piggy-backing on the work of others.
The names of my grandparents appeared on passenger lists of ships sailing across the Atlantic from Italy to New York’s Ellis Island: Bertolo Tolot. Giovanni Ricci. Ottavia Innocente. I found the names of most of my great-grandparents: Visilio and Augusta Zanotelli; Guiseppe Ricci and Maria Pieragostini; Carlo Innocente and Maria Santarossa.
Then the trail into my genealogical past abruptly went cold, so I started tracing my husband’s side.
I was lucky enough to know my husband’s grandmother, Irene Nevills, who was married to Victor Stuart. Other names I found I quickly recognized from trips to mid-Michigan cemeteries: Arthur and Alice Stuart; Fred Nevills and Amelia Edick.
Outside of his grandparents Thomas and Annie McGurn, who came to the U.S. from Ireland in the early 1900s, my husband’s family has lived in the U.S. and Canada since way before the Revolutionary War.
One day, after I made the genealogical leap across the Atlantic, I stumbled across an ancestor born in Kendal Castle in England. A birth in a castle means a royal must be close, I figured. Could it be the elusive Mary, Queen of Scots?
One Kendal Castle relative led to another. It was then that I ignored my “direct-blood-lines only” search method to take one step sideways to lay claim to Katherine Parr, the last wife of King Henry VIII. She is my husband’s first cousin, 14 times removed.
I was in Mary, Queen of Scots territory; I felt it in my bones. But while the connection to her remained elusive, other “royal” discoveries fell into my lap. There were dukes and duchesses and sirs and ladies, and then there was Maud La Vavosaur, my husband’s 23rd great grandmother, believed to be Maid Marion of Robin Hood fame. My husband’s family descended from a child she had with her first husband, Theobold Fitzwalter, whom she married when she was 12. Robin Hood was her second husband, Fulk Fitzwarin.
The farther back I got in my husband’s lineage, the more interesting things got until I hit the genealogical jackpot: Charlemagne, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, who lived from 742-813. Charlemagne is my husband’s 42nd great-grandfather.
I’ve found direct ancestors of my husband with descriptors as part of their names: the Fearless, the Bastard, Bluetooth, the Great, the Short, the Fat. I also found Edward I, King of England, who lived from 871-924.
But, alas, no Mary, Queen of Scots.
However, serendipity decided to have a little laugh at my full-blooded Italian expense: Bernard, King of Italy, who lived from 797-818, is my husband’s 40th great-grandfather.
The second season of "Who Do You Think You Are?" begins at 8 p.m. tonight (Friday, Feb. 4) on NBC.
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Comments
As for Edward, every man ever elected President of the Untied States shares him as a common ancestor, and who ever has more English/French royal blood tends to win the election.
Here is a fun nugget. Samuel Hinckley and his wife Sarah Toole who lived in Massachusetts in 1700s have these people as descendants:
J.P. Morgan
John Hinckley, Jr
Gordon Hinckley
George H.W. Bush
George W. Bush
Barack Obama
Sarah Palin
Keep on searching for ancestors. They all live inside us and though we don't know all their names or details of their lives, yet their memories from birth to birth form the very way we view the world.
It makes sense that the farther along the family tree, the more people are related to each other. I didn't write about it here, but the root tracing sometimes freaked me out, like those weird, a-ha moments one gets after smoking pot, when the enormity of the generations of the world made me feel both a cog in something quite important and a totally insignificant speck of carbon, if that makes any sense at all.
More research showed that from her and her father are ancestors of many high achieving writers, theologians, politicians and actors in American culture such as John Brown, Tennessee Williams, Humphrey Bogart, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, Robert Lowell, E.A. Robinson, Herbert Hoover, David Souter, John Kerry, Christopher Reeve, Kelsey Grammer, John Lithgow, Paul Giamatti, Alan Shepherd, and more than a dozen others.
I worked hard at poetry craft more than 20 years before I discovered they were my relatives. I found I share so much with them in how I write and think. It is a combination of nature and nurture. We find ourselves alive with a carbon imprint, and then we make of ourselves something beyond our limitations.
We crawl up from the sea of dreams and seek a moment of higher consciousness before we sink back into the sea of souls.
I caught on quickly to the quirkiness of some of the ancestry.com stuff. While it would be cool to have that kind of power over the circle of life, kids just can't be born before their parents. It's all got to be taken with a critical eye. That said, it is a lot of fun. I only wish I could find out more about my own ancestors.
I don't want to know where I came from...too scary!
I'm pretty sure that I'm a direct descendant of Vlad the Impaler. Maybe I need to start doing the research!
I love that your son wanted you to do this - so many kids could care less.
Fascinating stuff, here-- as much in the journey as in the discovery. No one on my side has ever found anything terribly exciting, though I am apparently related to the writer Evelyn Waugh through my mother's side.
One slight correction before I go-- Catherine Parr was the wife of Henry VIII, not Henry VII. That Catherine managed to outlive Henry should have provided some clue as to the longevity of your husband's line!
I don't think Mary's son had children, I don't see any further genealogy past him in the books I've been reading on the era. So, I think her line ends with her son being King and then the royal families of Scotland and England moved to another branch of the family.
I really should talk with my sister about this, she's been keeping the family ancesteral "books" over the past few years. I don't know how much research she's done but it could be interesting.
Another route you can take is to trace your DNA with a National Geographic project called The Genographic Project. I believe it's about $100, involves a cheek swab, and then you get results back showing your origin from tens of thousands of years ago. A colleague did it, and said it was absolutely fascinating. Your son might really like that. I know I would, if I had an extra hundred bucks!
Interestingly enough, somewhere in my wife's tree, a Stuart princess married an english prince, and one or two generations later is when they moved to the US, sometime in the late 16th century. So not only Stuarts but descendants of Platagenets. When you look at the family tree, you see not only Robert the Bruce, but you see various English royalty. When you see the movie Braveheart, there is an implication (wildly wrong of course) that the child of Edward II's wife - that I would assume is meant to be Edward III - is actually fathered by William Wallace.
Long story short - I like to tease my wife that she is the illegitimate descendant of William Wallace.