The ladder in the west

The female lines of my father's grandmother have always been the quiet side of this family's research, and this month they stopped being quiet. Starting from Jane Hunt, who married into the Lane line in 1783, four printed pedigrees checked against each other produced something close to fifty new documented direct ancestors, in three ladders that interlock like the family had planned it.

The stories come thick. In 1657, in the same county in the same year, two of the family's ancestors arrived in Munster: Vere Hunt, Cromwellian officer, and Mountiford Westropp, Cromwellian official; their descendants married five generations later, neither family knowing they had landed together. The ladder runs through Sir Francis Berkeley of Askeaton, a cadet of the house of Berkeley Castle, whose wife was a daughter of Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Dublin, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and first Provost of Trinity College. A second Archbishop-Chancellor, Thomas Jones of Dublin, stands one rung along. Bishop Henry Jones of Meath, the man who gave the Book of Kells to Trinity, is a direct ancestor through the Piers baronets of Tristernagh; so is the sister of Sir James Ware the historian. Through Constantia Piers the line climbs to the FitzMaurice Barons Kerry and from them into the oldest blood in Munster: the Earls of Desmond, the O'Briens of Thomond of Brian Boru's house, the Roches of Fermoy.

And because this family's records refuse to be entirely grand, the same ladder carries a Restoration publican: Constance Long, grandmother of the name Constantia, was the daughter of the wine-seller of the Rose Tavern in Covent Garden, the very house Pepys kept finding reasons to visit. Her grandson-in-law's grandfather fought at the Boyne, on the losing side, and followed his king to France. Archbishops, innkeepers and Jacobites, one ladder.

One legend rides along, labelled as a legend: the Hunts' claimed descent from the de Veres, Earls of Oxford, which rests on a 1573 Essex marriage the old heralds themselves put in quotation marks. Two and a half centuries later a Hunt took the name de Vere by royal licence on the strength of it. It has never been proven and it is told here as what it is: the family believing something magnificent, which is itself part of the record.

Every person named is now on the tree, with their sources graded the way this site grades everything. The printed book knew none of this; that is what the Journal is for.