Today I was approached by BBC Three Counties Radio in Luton (I live in Watford) and asked if I would talk about it on air, which I did. I said I didn’t think it was particularly unusual at all, since if we could all go back to the Middle Ages and before that to the Norman Conquest we woud find – disregarding immigrants – that all of us are distantly related to everybody else in some way or other.

There is a well-known mathematical paradox, which goes as follows: if you double the number of ancestors in every generation, theoretically by the time you get back to William the Conqueror in around 30 generations you will find we all have hundreds of millions ancestors. Do the maths, folks! However, in 1086 when William I’s Domesday Book was published, the entire population of Britain was estimated at no more than 2 million. Doesn’t work, does it?

So what’s the answer? It lies in the fact that there were many, many thousands of cousin marriages and the same ancestors appear over and over again in countless family trees. Look at the websites on descendants of William the Conqueror sometime. Today there are estimated to be anything from 3 to 5 million of them living and many, including famous ones, can be found on websites.

I have a friend and genealogist colleague who descends from “William the Bastard” in more than 1600 different lines. Worth thinking about?

On the whole I agree. Except tonight they threw us a curve ball with a brilliant programme about Dervla Kirwin, which I thought was going to be about Michael Collins, and instead ended up as… well something rather special really! One of the best ever episodes. That’s how they should be done – good stories, well told. It’s all you can ask for really!

Chris

The programme on Bruce Forsyth concentrated entirely on just one aspect, his alleged “bigamous” great-grandfather, who turned out not to be a bigamist – at least, not in the legal sense of the word, anyway – since they never found a marriage to the woman he left his wife for. I concede they had a problem in that if there was, in fact, a marriage in America, then every state would have to be checked, since the US has no system of federal records covering the whole country. However, as far as I recall, they only checked in New York State and Atlanta, Georgia.

Equally, with Rupert Everett there was a concentration on a “dodgy” ancestor who kept disappearing and had several wives/women. The research shown was poor, as some commentators here seem to think. At one point Everett was seen presented with half a dozen census possibles in his search for the elusive Georgina and just went straight to the first one, not even bothering to look at the others. Very sloppy, I thought!

No doubt the producers will argue that it’s entertainment and not real family history. However, I fear the series will bring into genealogy a host of amateur beginners who have no clue as to what they are doing and, consequently, they will end up proliferating rubbish all over the internet.

Far from dismissing his seafaring great-grandfather he seemed to relish finding a link to another rebel like himself. Only of course this kind of inverted snobbery doesn’t make one a rebel at all, just another kind of self-congratulating tribal personality.

What the programme did fail to research was the fate of the family of his bankrupt stockbrocking gt gt grandfather – I believe I found his widowed Gt Gt Grandmother Jemima Agnes Everett living in one of the East End of London’s Common Lodging Houses working as a Laundress in 1881, hiding by using her middle name, with her children scattered across various charity schools. Everett was so fixated on seeing his great grandfather as a rebel stomping out on a hated, oppressive, snobbish family that he totally missed the real human tragedy at the heart of his family’s history.

Reminds me of the programme about Sue Townsend in the ?first series where she eulogised her inverted snob grandfather at the expense of his ‘snobbish’ parents, only for the programme to reveal the bitter poverty and tragedy which lay in her great grandfather’s earlier life. Didn’t seem to change her ‘anti-snob’ opinions, at least not on air. Too much of a challenge for the ‘right-thinking’ thespian.