I have a special affection for Ragnar, but not for the reasons you’d think. I’m a volunteer curator at Geni.com, but several years ago I got thrown out of the site by another curator, Anette. We have a Ragnar Lodbrog project at Geni, as you might expect. Anette started the project. A bunch of us worked on it. Until Anette got mad. Then she threw me out of the project, along with at...
They found it. Or more accurately, they’ve decided what they found in 1979 really is it. I’m talking about a mass grave at Repton in Derbyshire. The experts have solved a dating problem. Now it seems very likely the bodies are from the Great Heathen Army. Here’s the short version. In 865 vikings from coming from the Continent joined forces to invade the kingdoms that comprised...
Everyone is descended from royalty. It’s just the way it works. At this point this fact should be so well known the universal reaction should be a yawn. But somehow the news hasn’t reached a lot of researchers. So, worth another post. Adam Rutherford wrote about this recently. He starts off, “Charlemagne, Carolingian King of the Franks, Holy Roman Emperor, the great European...
Genealogists today often think of genealogy as a search for the truth about family relationships and history. But, for our royal and noble ancestors genealogy was something different. It was a two-pronged propaganda campaign. One goal was to prove they were an ancient and distinguished family. The other goal was to prove that they were entitled to whatever titles, territories, and privileges they...
FamilySearch: Â Documenting Royal Ancestry