Mrs Pepys is a cousin

This one requires precision, because the temptation to overclaim is enormous and the precise version is better anyway.

The family's line runs through Lavinia Kingsmill, who married Matthew Pennefather, a daughter of Colonel William Kingsmill of Ballybeg Abbey. In her grandfather's generation stands Dorothea Kingsmill, whose daughter by the Sieur de St Michel was Elizabeth: the fifteen-year-old beauty who in 1655 married a young naval clerk named Samuel Pepys. So the blood cousin is Elizabeth, Mrs Pepys herself. The diarist is a cousin's husband, kin by marriage, the same careful standing this family long ago granted Roger d'Amory, and it is the right standing: close enough to claim the dinner-table stories, honest enough to survive a pedant.

It should be said that the rung this hangs on was tested hard. For one alarming day in August, Burke's appeared to contradict itself about whose daughter Lavinia was, and since a whole ascent hung on her, everything above was held back until it resolved. It resolved: the alarm was a misreading of Burke's own numbering, and two independent readings of the page confirm Lavinia as William of Ballybeg's daughter. The rung stands, the hold is lifted, and the story can be told.

And the best part is that this site already knew Samuel Pepys, without knowing it knew him. The Piers chapter has long recorded that my ancestress Constance Long was the daughter of the wine-seller of the Rose Tavern in Covent Garden, "the house Samuel Pepys kept finding reasons to visit." It turns out that when he stopped finding reasons and went home, the woman waiting there was our cousin. A family that has spent a summer collecting kings would trade several of them for one paragraph about itself in that diary; the search of its 1.25 million words is hereby declared open.

The Kingsmill ladder is on the tree, graded as always.