The Earliest Known Documented Ancestors of Aynsley Damery, and Their Times

My Damery line carries a tradition reaching far beyond this table, the Norman d’Amories of Oxfordshire (Sir Robert, Sir Richard and Roger), the Damer Earls of Dorchester who descend from them in the male line, and beyond that the French and Frisian legend of Part I. Earliest and noblest bearers of a rare name: most probably the well my own line sprang from, though no record yet joins us to them.

And one more deep claim once stood beside it, entered in the same spirit: through Anne Hamilton Lane, the family claimed kinship with the Lanes of Bentley Hall (Jane Lane's people) and, behind them, the Bagots of Blithfield, a line documented as far back as Domesday itself. Chapter 12 explains how I tested that claim and where it broke down.

When the printed book went to press there were two roads to Domesday, one through my father's name and one through a Limerick wedding, "both cherished, neither yet earned." Both are now overtaken by a third, which was hiding inside the same Limerick wedding all along, and it did not stop at Domesday. It ran through the bride, not the groom: Jane Hunt descended from Jane Vere of Gosfield, whose descent from the Earls of Oxford is proven three times over, and up through the Clare earls and an acknowledged son of King Henry I the documented line climbs, graded at every rung, past the Conquest to William the Conqueror, Alfred the Great and Charlemagne. Two further royal roads, one to the Plantagenets and one to Edward III, were tested in the same weeks and failed inspection, and the site keeps them as failures, which is what lets the council of crowns that held be believed. The whole ascent is told in Chapters 22 to 24 of the living edition.

So my father's dream of a line to the Conquest is answered, and answered larger than he dared, but not down the road he searched. The d'Amory road, the one through our own surname, remains unearned and open, the true prize still waiting at a Bandon Damery of about 1690, whose very trade is still a guess. And yet even that road has been brushed, three times, the last of them exact: Roger d'Amory's wife, Elizabeth de Clare, was the first cousin of my direct ancestress Margaret de Clare, both granddaughters of one earl, which makes the baron my own surname points at the husband of my ancestress's first cousin. Proven kinship by marriage; the name itself still a question. The pattern is turned in the light in the Journal: the family reached the Conquest, and the crown beyond it, not through the rare name it hunted, but through a bride nobody had thought to check.