First thing that arises in your mind when you awake
Today I was in the car with my mom and my sister and I was thinking about the Queen of England. I said something about how cool it would be to trace back Elizabeth's lineage all the way to Queen Elizabeth the I. And then my mom said, "oh yeah, I've done that." So now I have, sitting on my desk next to my math book, two large rolls of green contact paper containing the family tree of the royal family of England. My mom compiled it when she was 13 or so, before Prince Charles had married Princess Diana and fathered Harry and William. (And before they had tv and the internet.)I've got Henry VIII rolled out in front of me right now. His six wives (I just tested my mom - she knows all their names by heart) are printed out neatly below him in my mom's 8th grade handwriting. Right under Anne Boleyn is Elizabeth I, in big capital letters. But Elizabeth never married or had any kids, so there aren't any lines drawn from her. The only way to connect to her is through her aunts and uncles, Henry's siblings - Mary and Margaret, whose descendants Anabella Staurt and William Seymour appear to have married but never had any kids.
I've only unrolled that roll about two feet. It's still wound around its cardboard tubing 10 times. I'm really tempted to unroll it all and spend hours on the floor with a big encyclopedia, looking all these people up, studying their portraits. I'm sure there are holes in here somewhere, and I want to fill them in. I love the organization of it - mapping out where someone came from and who they're connected with, laying it all out on paper.
The second of the two rolls is the last three centuries, going back to the 1700s. It's a lot more detailed than the first roll, a lot more crowded, with birth years and notes everywhere that say "see table B". God, just imagine being able to trace your lineage back that far. There's so much out there to learn.
I wonder if Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is on here. Was she royal?
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