The Descents
The ancestry, by the numbers
Counted from the master file on 27 October 2026. Every figure here is arithmetic on the tree itself: who stands behind this household, and how many separate roads lead back to each of them.
How many ways in
A pedigree is not a tree so much as a net. The same ancestor is reached again and again by different routes, because the families in it married one another for centuries. The figures below count every distinct chain of parent links from Aynsley back to each person, not the shortest one.
| Ancestor | Roads | In July |
|---|---|---|
| Otto the Great, Holy Roman Emperor | 4 | — |
| Brian Boru, High King of Ireland | 5 | 1 |
| John of Brienne, King of Jerusalem | 6 | — |
| Bleddyn ap Cynfyn, King of Powys and Gwynedd | 19 | — |
| Edward I | 21 | 1 |
| Afonso I Henriques, first King of Portugal | 27 | — |
| Rhys ap Tewdwr, King of Deheubarth | 43 | 1 |
| Henry II | 67 | — |
| The Empress Matilda | 67 | 2 |
| Cerball mac Dúnlainge, King of Osraige | 89 | — |
| William the Conqueror | 112 | 6 |
| Vladimir the Great of Kiev | 269 | 8 |
| Alfred the Great | 467 | — |
| Rollo the Viking | 1,619 | 14 |
| Charlemagne | 2,921 | 30 |
What the numbers are really measuring
It is tempting to read this column as a ranking of grandeur, with Charlemagne at the top and the Holy Roman Emperors at the bottom. It is not. A large number means only that the descendants of that person married one another relentlessly for the next five hundred years, so the lines running down from him cross and recross before they reach Cork. A small one means a house that entered this family once and did not come again: Otto the Great by four roads, Jerusalem by six.
The man who founded the Empire is the most reachable ancestor in the tree. The emperors who revived his title are among the least.
The oldest road, and the narrowest
Two facts in this file sit together, and between them they say what this ancestry is.
The furthest ancestor it reaches is not Frankish or Norman. He is Dúnlaing mac Énda Niada, the man the Uí Dúnlainge are named for, who gave his name to the dynasty that held the kingship of Leinster for three hundred years. He stands forty-five generations behind this household, with his wife Cuach of the Uí Bairrche, deeper than Charlemagne and deeper than Rollo.
And Brian Boru, who was two roads in August and three last week, is now reached by five. Every Irish king behind him has multiplied in the same way. But the five roads are not five independent descents. They share their first twelve rungs, and they fork only at the far end.
The oldest ancestor in the tree and the narrowest join in it are the same line. Dúnlaing, forty-five generations back, is reached through Constantia Piers, exactly as Brian Boru is, and as the MacCarthy kings of Desmond and the lords of Carbery are. Two thousand nine hundred and twenty-one roads lead to Charlemagne, and every one of the Irish ones, the oldest in the whole ancestry, passes through a single woman whose descent was proved from her mother's own registered will.