IRONBRANCHES: William the Conquerer

I have often told people that this blog will focus mainly on our collective family in the Colonies and the United States. I have dipped my toe into things European at times as it adds context in terms of why people came to this new land and with what attitudes. But I have a friend who is an Irishman linked to Brian Boru and he is alway asking me about our links to royalty. I tend to point to our connections to the Founding Father of this country but sometimes that is not adequate and his questions made me wonder.

I had been told that we are linked to Charlemagne on my mother's side and there is ample evidence of gentry on my father's side going back to the Normans so I thought that I would see. In this I am grateful to a man named Alan Freer who put together a website on the lineage of William the Conquerer. He put four decades into this work so that all I had to do was verify and document my direct line to William of Normandy through my father, William of...Greenleaf Lake. My brother, also William, provided a family genealogy that gave me hints on how we might connect with Mr. Freer's documentation. The last piece being sorting out the Grahams of Norton-Conyers.

As I journeyed though 1000 years and thirty generations of my family, I was struck by many things. We use the same names a lot, likely in honor of our ancestors. William, Richard and Henry come to mind as well as Elizabeth and Eleanor. The stories too and connections. We were plotters and warriors often dying young and gruesomely--poisoned, sword-chopped and beheaded. We were great heroes like Henry "Hot Spur" Percy and iconic cads like King John Lackland. We honored marriage like the Percy's and their stained glass windows and we might have had a few illegitimate children here and there. In short, we are like all families living through diverse and challenging times.