Geni Projects

Geni Projects

by Justin Durand

These are a few of the projects I started at Geni.com.

Many of my Geni projects reflect the work I did many years ago in graduate school about fictional genealogy in the Middle Ages. Back then, my primary interest was in the chansons de geste, the Arthurian legends, and the Scandinavian sagas.

Nowadays, my interest has broadened to include all forms of fictional genealogy, as well as ongoing academic attempts to find the Holy Grail of genealogy — a verifiable Descent from Antiquity.

I’ve mostly left the projects in other hands now, but many of them still contain good research summaries and sources.

America and the American West

There are many interesting stories in the world without resorting to fake genealogy.

Biblical Links

There are no proven links between Western Europe and biblical genealogies. There is a possible link through Paloma, but it’s controversial, More importantly, there is no proven descent from Makhir of Narbonne. The connection to Makhir was an academic theory that didn’t stand up to further research, but it is still alive in Internet fantasies.

Chivalric Orders

Descents from Antiquity

Despite what you might find on Geni, there are no proven descents from antiquity to western Europe. The oldest line generally accepted as proven is the O’Neill family back to about 600 — not quite far enough to reach Niall of the Nine Hostages himself. If you find a line on Geni that shows you are a descendant of Roman emperors, the kings of Troy, King Arthur, Cleopatra, King Herod, or Alexander the Great, it’s a known fake. These lines are on Geni only because so many people keep trying to add them back.

DNA for Genealogy

DNA is one of the best modern tools we have for investigating ancient stories.

Family Projects

Fictional Genealogy

Western Europe has a rich tradition of genealogies invented by different royal families as propaganda to create the illusion of antiquity. Some of the projects in this area are:

Heraldry

Irish Kingdoms

Jewish Genealogy

Locality Projects

These are places that have captured my attention, where I am interested in almost any connection someone has.

Modern Nonsense

  • Fake Titles. Geni has a few dozen users who are fake knights, princes, countesses, and so on. They are generally engaged in personal projects to prove they are the heirs of old royal families, descendants of Jesus, Grail princes, or members of a holy bloodline.
  • Holy Blood, Holy Grail. An idea drawn from popular culture, not history, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, had children with her, and was the ancestor of the Merovingian dynasty.

Mormon History

Mythology

It should not surprise us that many tribal cultures believed they were descended from their gods.

  • Odin’s Kin. Descents from the Norse god Odin to the kings of Scandinavia, England, and Scotland.

The Scandinavian Sagas project isn’t one I created, but it’s pivotal to work in this area. The saga genealogies, some good, some bad. Most of them will start a shouting match between opposing camps.

New Age and Metaphysical Connections

Occupations

Royal & Noble

Saga Genealogies

Scottish Clans

The umbrella project for Scottish Clans was created and is administered by June Barnes.

Swedish Genealogy

Miscellaneous

Recovering the Gunn lineage

Recovering the Gunn lineage

by Justin Durand

I don’t have any known Gunn ancestry but I got interested in them a lifetime ago. Someone at the Family History Center in Salt Lake City suggested the Swanstroms, if they were originally Scottish, might have been Gunns.

Actually, I think the idea was that the Swanstroms absolutely, positively had to be Gunns for a variety of reasons, but we won’t worry about that because they’re not. Nevertheless, I was left with a lifelong interest in the Gunns.

A tradition that evolved only in the past few hundred years claims an illustrious descent for the Gunns. They are said to be descended from Sweyn Asleifson, poetically called The Ultimate Viking.

However, this descent is known to be nonsense. It’s endlessly repeated because so many people prefer romance to reality. I’m not immune myself. For many years, I carried Eric Linlater’s novel The Ultimate Viking (1956) on my list of use books to find and read. It was long out of print, so I had very little hope of finding it. It was only a few years, with the advent of the Internet, that I was able to find and buy a copy.

As I struggle to break the addiction to romantic fantasies, I’ve come to admire the work of Alastair Gunn, whose no-nonsense style is bringing Gunn history into the light of reality. His idea is that the first known ancestor of what became the “chiefly family” was George Gunn (“Coroner Gunn”), died 1464. Everything before him has been concocted out of unconnected bits and pieces.

There’s a Facebook group for Clan Gunn that posts occasional updates. See it here. I haven’t watched it long enough yet to know the general feeling about the legendary origin of the Gunns, but on Geni.com, which is supposed to be a respectable genealogical site, there has been quite a bit of vitriol around conforming the Gunn line to the facts. I created a Clan Gunn project there a few years ago and did some cleanup. It hasn’t been an easy sell.

Some day I need to go back and clean up my own notes.

Side note: If I have any Gunn ancestry at all it would be through Bessie Rorieson [Gunn], mistress of John Sinclair, Master of Caithness (d. 1575). They were the parents of Henry Sinclair of Lybster, speculative father of immigrant John Sinclair (d. 1700), of Exeter, New Hampshire.

Post-Christian America

Post-Christian America

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

My sense from talking to our customers is that there is trend toward post-Christian America that is likely to be vaguely pagan, but not exactly pagan in the way my generation (Boomers) might think of it.

“I’ve become interested in books and arguments that suggest that there actually is, or might be, a genuinely post-Christian future for America and that the term “paganism” might be reasonably revived to describe the new American religion, currently struggling to be born.

“A fascinating version of this argument is put forward by Steven D. Smith, a law professor at the University of San Diego, in his new book, Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac. Smith argues that much of what we understand as the march of secularism is something of an illusion, and that behind the scenes what’s actually happening in the modern culture war is the return of a pagan religious conception, which was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of Christianity.

“What is that conception? Simply this: that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.“

Read More:

Jews in the New World, II

Jews in the New World, II

by Justin Durand

We’ve seen this idea, now very common, that many Hispanos in the American Southwest have crypto-Jewish ancestry.

The evidence for this exotic ancestry is weak. The story seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, and there is some reason to believe it might have its roots in the 19th and 20th century Seventh Day Adventists.

A recent story in The Atlantic seems to go the other direction, offering some new genetic evidence.

“Chacón-Duque and his colleagues pieced together the genetic record by sampling DNA from 6,500 people across Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, which they compared to that of 2,300 people all over the world. Nearly a quarter of the Latin Americans shared 5 percent or more of their ancestry with people living in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, including self-identified Sephardic Jews.”

Sarah Zang, “The Genetic Legacy of the Spanish Inquisition” in The Atlantic (Dec. 21, 2018).

But that’s not quite the same thing as saying Latin Americans have crypto-Jewish ancestry. This is about people with Jewish ancestry, not necessarily people who are practicing Judaism secretly. And even then, the article goes on to say, “DNA alone cannot prove that conversos were the source of this ancestry, but it fits with the historical record.”

In fact, because of the history of the Iberian peninsula from Roman times to the discovery of America, there would be quite a bit of mixed ancestry among the New World colonists. Not just from the time of the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 but also from the preceding centuries as well.

After the expulsion of the Jews, the Spanish and Portuguese were deeply suspicious of those who converted to Christianity, and equally suspicious of their descendants. They were haunted, it seems, by the idea these people might be practicing their former religion in secret. They emphasized limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), and went to great lengths to hide mixed marriages in their own ancestries.

Given the stigma of converso ancestry it would be no surprise if the immigrants to America included a number of people with Jewish and Muslim ancestry. And this is all this new study is reporting. The evidence is consistent with widespread and low-level converso ancestry in Latin America. We don’t need to add to the stories about crypto-Judaism.

For the original article, see Juan-Camilo Chacón-Duque et al., “Latin Americans show wide-spread Converso ancestry and imprint of local Native ancestry on physical appearance” in Nature (Dec. 19, 2018).

Cantaloupe

Cantaloupe

by Justin Durand

Having just finished writing about tomatoes, I couldn’t find a place to sneak a quick bit about cantaloupes.

Talking to Mom yesterday, she was reminiscing about how much Daddy liked salt on everything. And he didn’t much like sugar because when he was growing up he drowned in sweets from his German mother. That’s why he didn’t let us have sugar on our tomatoes.

Mom says she’s always surprised that I put salt on melon, like Daddy did. She prefers sugar.

When she was growing up her dad would buy three cantaloupes. They’d cut them in half, scoop out the seeds, and fill the halves with cream, sugar, and nutmeg.

I remember doing that, both at home and at Aunt Betty’s, but I’d forgotten until now.