Yes – really – he was (probably!)
Let’s go back a year to March 2020 when I decided that it was a good time to explore my family tree. I had started 10 years previously and got stuck so I put it on the “things to do” pile. When I went back to it I was pleasantly surprised that the tools and research materials are now much better than before. I registered with one of the ancestry websites and checked all of my previous work and fairly quickly filled in most of my relatives back to the mid 19th century. The censuses, births, marriages & deaths information that are now stored, and are easily searchable, is quite incredible. Most of my relatives were farm labourers with a sprinkling of pub landlords and shop keepers too. So far quite unremarkable.
I then remembered an old family story that I am related via my maternal line to the residents of Picton Castle in Pembrokeshire. After a lot of research I discovered that this was indeed true and my great, great grandmother was the daughter of the 9th Baronet. The family has lived at Picton Castle for hundreds of years and has a well established, and authenticated, family tree.
I then explored the various branches of this part of my family and discovered something interesting, which in hindsight is somewhat obvious. Anyone who has read, or seen, any sort of period drama will know that there are some fundamental “truths” that pervade most of them. Firstly, anyone who is in the lower levels of the gentry aspire for their family to move up to the next level. Secondly, everything revolves around money, land and power. A family wants to, at worst, keep the estate and power that they have but ideally wants to increase it via a “good” marriage. Sons and daughters were married off to other families like breeding cattle. Thirdly, everyone wants to be related to royalty and if they are not they may invent relatives and relationships to make it up (I found several of these). As part of this families also wanted to show that they are directly related to William the Conqueror, or a lord who was sitting next to him on the boat over from Normandy in 1066. This makes the job of researching your family tree pre 19th century very difficult because you can’t take anything at face value. Lastly, all of these families seem to be related to each other. So rather than having a typical organised family tree this branch of mine has a tree that resembles a pan of spaghetti!
So to cut a very long story short through extensive use of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (www.oxforddnb.com), the various “visitations” that were conducted by law primarily in the 15th to 17th centuries to document families linages and crests, and the Picton Castle family trees, I established that William de Cantilupe (sometime spelt Cantelupe or Cauntelo), who was Lord of Calne and Calstone in the years around 1220, was my 24 times great grandfather!
I thought I would share with you some of my top tips for building a family tree.
1. Subscribe to a genealogy website but only do it when you have time to do some serious research. The subscriptions are usually paid by the month and can quickly mount up. If you don’t have time to do any research for a few weeks you are wasting your money.
2. The genealogy websites now have things called “hints’. Be very careful with these. Sometimes the hints come from the website doing behind the scenes searches of official records, but sometimes the hints come from family trees of other users. With this second type you have no idea how much diligence people put into creating their family tree and whether they were influenced by the desire to be related to someone historically famous! I made the mistake of putting too much weight on these hints and then had to spend a lot of time unpicking the errors introduced later.
3. A lot of genealogy is based on probabilities. For example, if your great grandfather was called John Smith and lived at 1 High Street in the 1881 census there is a high probability that John Smith living at 1 High Street in the 1871 census probably refers to your great grandfather. But when you find that in the 1861 census that somebody else lived at 1 High Street and a John Smith lived 3 miles away that is not necessarily the same person. In general people were not very mobile before the 20th century but they did move many miles on occasions to find work. Most farm labourers, for example, lived in tied cottages and only had annual contracts (a real contract can be found on calstone.org website). If the contract was not renewed they had to move to find work.
4. Try to get several pieces of evidence to demonstrate a link to potential relative, and document the sources. It takes a lot longer than simply copying and pasting a family tree that someone else has produced into your own, but it is part of the fun of creating a family tree. Afterall what is the point of finding a potential relative if you made a mistake, or unwise assumption, about who your great grandfather was. It means that whole branch of the family is wrong.
5. It is said that if you go back far enough everyone is related to everyone else. This may well be true but the fun is in demonstrating a link to past with some degree of confidence.
6. Don’t believe everything you read on the web. As mentioned before some people put in a lot more effort to demonstrate a link than others. Local history societies and informal groups based around certain surnames can produce well researched information. Information gained from probate records / wills can be very valuable.
7. Double check census material by looking at a copy of the source material yourself – it is all available online. I have found several material mistakes in the transcription of the census data on genealogy websites.
8. When you get stuck on a branch of your family tree document why you are stuck and come back to it later, maybe years later. More and more information is being digitised all the time which may help e.g. newspaper reports.
9. When you have exhausted all of your searches on one genealogy website export your family tree onto another site to check any new hints that it may provide. Be very careful doing this as data can be lost in the transfer, e.g. some references. I always keep the main family tree on findmypast.com and load a copy onto ancestry.com. I then manually replicate any changes made there back to findmypast.com. This is a painful process, and I wouldn’t advocate doing it for a long period but it did help me to find new leads. Of course to do this you have to pay for a subscription for the second website but you only need to do it for a short while, and you can temporarily cancel the other one.
10. It would be nice to assume that if two ancestors were married then any children would be a result of their “coupling”. Of course this is not always the case. There is a growing trend to use DNA profiles to help to overcome this problem but I have not taken that step yet.
11. Place a different weighting on the validity of information depending on the source. For example, I trust the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography more than Wikipedia, as leading academics are invited to write a piece for the dictionary based on their specialist knowledge. Even then I found entries in the dictionary that contradicted each other.
Who was William de Cantilupe?
It is not clear when he was born but he was probably the son of Walter de Cantilupe, a landowner in Essex and Lincolnshire. He married Mazilia de Braci who was an heiress with land in Buckinghamshire and Kent.
William was a steward to King John who appointed him Sheriff of Warwickshire and Sheriff of Leicestershire. His main residence was Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire. He was an ally of King John and received several manors stripped from rebel Barons. He was named by Roger of Wendover as one of King John’s “evil counsellors”!
He was an able diplomat able to navigate the complex politics of the day and continued to have influence with Henry II following the death of King John.
He was appointed a royal steward and had a close relationship with both Henry II and Henry III.
He managed to retain the royal manors of Calne and Calstone from when it was gifted to him by the king in 1219 until the end of his life, when they then passed to his son William. His second son was Walter was bishop of Worcester.
He had at least two daughters. Sybilla married Stephen Devereux and another daughter, Mabel, married Thurstin de Montfort.
He died in 1239.
(Reference – https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/4572)
One last thing, Geoffrey Fitz Peter, 1st Earl of Essex and Lord of the Manor of Cherhill, was my 22nd great grandfather! (I did say that everyone is related to everyone else!). Of course being Lord of Calne and Calstone trumps being Lord of Cherhill! 🙂
If you see me walking around the village looking like I own the place well I did, or rather my 24th great grandfather did anyway! Your x times great grandfather may well have done so too. If you go back 24 generations you have 16.8 million great grandparents. Of course many of them will be the same, through family trees crossing over, but there is a good chance that William de Cantilupe will be one of the 16.8 million.