Last fall I got a message from Sor María Jesús, of the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo el Real in Toledo, noting an error in one of my earlier webpages on Sancha de Ayala, where I had confused the two convents, the convent of Poor Clares, “Santa Isabel de los Reyes,” which is constructed in [...]
Besides our agnate (male-line) ancestry, and our matrilineal ancestry (also called the umbilical or mitochondrial line, to indicate the uterine mother-child bond or the exclusively maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA), what specific lines have any distinction, in an abstract sense, in the vast swath of the pedigree chart that lies between these two bookends? [...]
Following yesterday’s post on the romantic Stirling of Glorat story, I put together a royal descent (probably the closest one) for the American branch of the Stirlings of Glorat, as follows:
1. James V, King of Scots (d. 1542).
2. (illegitimate by Catherine, daughter of Sir John Carmichael) John Stewart, Commendator of Coldingham, Lord Darnley (d. 1563), [...]
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
One of the hidden treasures that has rewarded my browsing in The Ancestor (of which I recently bought a set of all twelve volumes in their original publisher’s bindings), is a handsome set of cuts made after fourteenth-century encaustic floor tiles from Tewkesbury Abbey. See Hal Hall, “Notes on the Tiles at Tewkesbury Abbey,” [...]
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
[Part of a series of posts and pages dedicated to Sancha de Ayala]
More photos of Sancha de Ayala’s maternal ancestral home, the Ayala stronghold at Quejana (Álava), near Bilbao. It is fascinating, and fortuitous, that the houses of both Sancha de Ayala’s paternal and maternal families have been preserved since the fourteenth century due [...]
Monday, February 23, 2009
In Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak’s review of Ted Evergates’ Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100-1300 (U. Penn. Press, 2007), just out in American Historical Review 114 (2009):192-3, she is not the first to point out how Evergates contradicts Duby’s orthodoxy by showing that the most important aristocratic family unit is not the lignage, but rather [...]
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Not everyone agrees with all of Oswald Barron’s opinions, but he is one of the revered champions of the golden age of critical genealogy (and other auxiliary historical disciplines) in late Victorian and Edwardian England. His own short-lived journal, The Ancestor, is a splendid readable collection of critical genealogy—Horace Round was a regular [...]
Monday, December 15, 2008
[Part of a series of posts and pages dedicated to Sancha de Ayala]
The first of a series of photographs of the rural Ayala castle at Quejana, home of Sancha de Ayala’s mother Ines, daughter of Fernán Pérez de Ayala and Elvira de Ceballos (who are buried in the chapel, along with Sancha’s famous uncle Pero [...]
Some years ago Chico Doria, a Brazilian mathematician and genealogist, wrote “One of my distant 15th-century ancestors was a canon who used to fool around with Angela Mendes, ‘a bonitinha,’ The Pretty One. I’m fascinated by her; I sometimes try to find out her face in the faces that I see in the streets.”
Chico’s words [...]
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Yesterday, in the R. Stanton Avery Manuscript Collection of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) in Boston, I had the chance to look at (and, with the acquiescence of Timothy Salls, the manuscript curator, take a couple of photographs of) the Promptuarium armorum, a heraldic miscellany by William Smith, Rouge Dragon Poursuivant in the [...]
