One household's ladders

This wing of the site is deliberately set apart, and here is why.

damery.family belongs to the name: the Bandon line, the branches worldwide, every spelling and every continent, and the wall at the head of the Damery pedigree that no record has yet broken. And if you carry the name, the front rooms of this site, The Name and the branches worldwide, are yours before any of this is mine.

What follows here is different. It is the ancestry of one household of the name, mine, and it climbs not the Damery name but the female lines of my father's grandmother's people, Jones to White to Lane and Hunt, and everything those ladders proved to lead to: the de Veres and the Clares, the crown of England twice, the Irish kingships, and at the summit thirteen royal houses and twelve sovereign crowns.

The rule of the whole site holds hardest here: nothing becomes true because we want it to be. Every rung is graded.

A word about what this is worth. Descent from Charlemagne is not rare. It is close to universal: go back forty generations and you have more ancestor-places than there were people alive, so the lines fold back on each other, and almost everyone of European descent today has the Emperor somewhere behind them. Millions descend from Edward I. If you are reading this, you very probably do too, and I would rather say so plainly.

What is rare is not the ancestor. It is the paper.

The ancestors on these pages are shared with hundreds of millions of people. The chain, this person, then this one, then this one, each with a record behind them, has been set down by a few thousand. That is the whole of what this is: not a claim to royal blood, which is common as clay, but a documented route to it, built one rung at a time.

Two things here are genuinely uncommon, and neither is the crowns themselves. The first is that these houses did not arrive together. The mathematics of descent bundles ancestors; it does not hand over evidence. Every one of these lines had to be found on its own, and nearly all of them came in through women, the wives' lines that most family research quietly abandons in favour of the surname.

The de Clares carry Ireland one way and, through King Henry the First and the Counts of Flanders, Alfred the Great, Robert the Second of France and Charlemagne.

The de Veres carry Charlemagne a second time by a different road entirely, the counts of Vermandois, and with him Italy, France, Kiev and Sweden.

The Butlers bring Edward the First, and behind him Scotland and Wales.

Sadb Ní Fáeláin brings the Uí Dúnlainge kings of Leinster, and the O'Briens bring Brian Boru.

Weeks of work separated the first of those discoveries from the last, and that two independent roads arrive at the same Emperor is a check on both.

The second uncommon thing is that the deepest chain of all is the Irish one, running to a king of Leinster in Saint Patrick's century, through records where every rung is hard won.

And the joke at the heart of it: this family can trace a line to an emperor twelve centuries back, and still cannot name the father of the man called Damery who walked into Bandon about 1690. The crowns were the easy part.

One more thing, said plainly because it matters. These ladders are one side of one household. My mother's people, the Elliotts and Bowdrens, the Condons and Sheehans of Cork and Tipperary, hold the other half of this blood, and their story, told in the printed book and on the person pages, is no smaller for carrying no crowns. Farms held through hard years, city streets, lines traced faithfully through the registers: that is what almost all true family history looks like, this family's included. The crowns are the exception. They are not the standard anything else is measured against.

The book continues

Nine chapters written since the printed book went to the family, telling each ladder as it was proven, failures first.