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Have a pedigree why don’t you

Elizabeth Aucher, 1561-1627

One day in 1580 or thereabouts, Elizabeth Aucher wed Sir William Lovelace of Bethersden, about whom I haven’t written yet, though I did recently profile his father. (Update: here’s young Wills.) All of these people lived in Kent, in or near Canterbury. They’re important to us because, within two generations, the Lovelaces would be mixing with the Gorsuch family and colonizing Virginia and Maryland.

I don’t know much about Elizabeth Aucher, but her grandfather and nephew, both named Sir Anthony Aucher, were interesting public characters cut from the same cloth. Specifically, they were both pretty good at making money but even better at spending it.[...] read more

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Alice Wilson’s Ahnentafel

The first Ahnentafel, published by Michaël Eytzinger in Thesaurus principum hac aetate in Europa viventium, Cologne, 1590

An Anhentafel (German for “ancestor table”)  is a scheme for numbering ancestors in strict sequence so that one can easily calculate relationships. The base person is number 1. Each father is assigned a number exactly double that of his child. Mothers are assigned a number equal to that of their husbands, plus 1.

So to navigate through the list: pick any person, note the assigned number, and you can find his or her father by doubling that number. The mother, if known, will be one digit higher and right next door. Likewise, to find anyone’s child, halve their assigned number and ignore any remainder. (Numbers missing from the sequence mean that we haven’t found that ancestor.)[...] read more