From Newsgroup: soc.genealogy.medieval
On 9/17/2024 5:36 PM, taf wrote:
On 9/14/2024 7:06 PM, Jan Wolfe wrote:
Are there other European couples who lived c. 600, other than
ancestors of Charlemagne, who have known late medieval or modern
descendants? If so, what are some of the known pathways?
Depends what you mean by 'documented'.
There are Irish and Welsh descents that trace that far back, but they
derive from pedigrees recorded 1000 years later, too long to view them
as fully reliable. (The Irish at least have chronicle sources naming
some of the people in the pedigrees, so at least they were historical.)
The DalRiada of Scotland also connect to these Irish pedigrees, but the connections in the earliest Scottish generations have been questioned.
This is very misleading. Given the context of this thread, which
started with |athelberht of Kent and his wife Bertha, and expanded to the question of whether you could get descents going back to ca. 600 or
earlier, the figure of "1000 years" is inappropriate, even if you use
the date of a surviving manuscript to decide when something was
"recorded". The Irish have at least two surviving twelfth century
manuscripts that I can think of off the top of my head (the Books of
Leinster and Glendalough) having huge collections of genealogies, and a
slew of others that are only a century or two older, often having copies
(or independent revisions) of much earlier genealogies. A large number
of these genealogical manuscripts have sections which can be traced back
to the eighth century with confidence by comparing different
manuscripts, and in some cases to the seventh century. As for the Irish annals, it is now generally agreed that there were (rather sparse) contemporary annals going back to ca. 550, but that all (or at least
virtually all) earlier events were added retrospectively. By the middle
of the next century, contemporary annals were being kept in several
places, and shared back-and-forth and collated with each other in a way
that makes their earlier versions difficult to trace. The extent to
which the pre-550 part of the annals can be trusted is unclear, but by
the time you go back to the early 400's, what passes for Irish "history"
is an inconsistent mess. But the picture from the middle of the sixth
century on is pretty solid, with a chronology that is almost always
exact to the year (after correcting for known errors) from 711 on, and
from ca. 680 on (and within one year back to ca. 660) if the convincing corrections of Nicholas Evans are correct. It is true that parts of
these records have been deliberately falsified over the years, but the
volume of the Irish manuscript corpus is so huge that falsifiers can
often be exposed by the inconsistencies they offer with other sources.
Many Irish dynasties have genealogies which fade into a mist of obscure
names not mentioned in the annals, of which many of the later names
might be valid until the earlier ones inevitably connect to some branch
of the mythical "Milesians." Still, there are some major dynasties
which appeared in the annals on a regular enough basis to be reliably
traced back to the sixth century, fading out before that when it becomes impossible to verify them. Of these, the Ui Dunlaing ancestors of Mor
(mother of "Eve" of Leinster) give the easiest path back to ca. 550
(although dubious elements are reached in the late 400's and early 500's).
The earliest Welsh manuscript collection of genealogies (the "Harleian" genealogies) dates from ca. 1100, being probably a direct copy (except
for possible copying errors) of a genealogy composed in the mid-900's.
Based on comparison with independent versions, some written version of
the genealogy of the kings of Gwynedd probably existed during the reign
of Mervyn Vrych, who became king of Gwynedd in the 820's. One of the genealogies in the Harleian collection (that of the kings of Dyfed) can
be traced back even earlier, to an independent Irish source dating to
the eighth century (although present only in later manuscripts) giving
the genealogy of the kings of the Deisi, an Irish sept from which the
kings of Dyfed descended. This tenth century Welsh source and eighth
century Irish source converge on an eighth century individual whose
ancestors in both sources agree back to the prehistoric period, and
include the historical early sixth (or late fifth) century king
Vortipore, king of Dyfed, a contemporary of Gildas. This gives a
plausible genealogy going back to ca. 500, but verified by contemporary evidence only at three points, ca. 500, ca. 750, and ca. 950. The Welsh annals are contemporary only from around the late eighth century, but
the Irish annals occasionally mentioned Welsh kings, including Cadwallon
(d. 633), an ancestor of Mervyn Vrych.
As for the kings of Dal Riata, the descent from king Gabran mac
Domangairt (sixth century) to king Eochaid amd Echach (d. 733) is well-documented. If a patronymic can be considered as "historical", we
could add Domangart at the beginning. With regard to Fergus, alleged
father of Domangart, I am now a bit more skeptical than I was when I
wrote a page for him for the Henry Project. I still lean toward
Fergus's existence as a king of Dal Riata (perhaps as the first
Christian king, which would explain why he heads the kinglists), but I
am now dubious about his genealogical connection to Domangart. As for
the genealogy back from Kenneth (Cinaed mac Ailpin), his father Alpin
and his grandfather Eochaid are names without any clear historical
context (apart from late sources), but his genealogy gives his great-grandfather as the historical king Aed Find, apparently the first
king of Dal Riata after the domination of Dal Riata by Onuist ("Angus"),
king of the Picts, for much of the eighth century. Aed Find was the son
of an Eochaid, apparently the king of Dal Riata who died in 733, so the ancestry of Kenneth is plausible enough. However, it must be
acknowledged that the documentation of Kenneth's descent from Eochaid
(d. 733) is much less solid than the generations from Eochaid back to
Gabran.
My apologies for omitting certain accents. I'm not that confident that
they would be correctly represented in the forum we now use.
Stewart Baldwin
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