Charlemagne, is the check in the mail?

Buck. That's what most of my friends call me. It's too bad I don't like being called that. One year, in college, my fraternity bought shirts that had the person's last name preceded by an "O" on the back, so my shirt was "O'buck". On the front of the shirt was "the only Irish fraternity on campus"... good stuff. When the shirts came I was quick to point out that my family's last name used to be O'Buck but that the "o" was dropped to disassociate the family with those drunken Irish sailors, who were not looked on with particular favor.

It was a good story and made the shirt a good conversation starter or ice-breaker.

While bubbling with Irish pride one day I came across an online ad for ancestry.com. It looked reputable enough so I went ahead an clicked on it. I signed up for a free two week trial membership and was off to the genealogical races. Ancestry has a feature called One Tree which users the information you put in and tries to match it with existing research. This made it possible to go back in time about 200 years in the first day. Every day throughout the next two weeks I found out more. By the sixth day of research (and I use the term loosely) I was already beginning to brag about the ties I was finding. Ironically, I'm not Irish at all. I'm not even sure any of my ancestors set foot on that British Isle. Regardless, you have to admit the O'Buck t-shirt story is a good one. In fact, every link of my fathers family I could get information from is from England. After that revelation I was particularly interested with the line that grants me my middle name, Clayton.

The Clayton family time line begins when Robert de Clayton came to England with William the Conqueror and was granted lands known as Clayton-le-Moors for his important military services during the invasion of 1066. It was as though my family was responsible for Europe coming out of the dark ages. Cool stuff eh?

Cool until you discover the problem with ancestry's one tree feature. The problem stems from everyone wanting to trace their line back as far as possible, just as I was doing. Unfortunately when people do research they are often guilty of being a tad liberal in their assumptions. It's not too much to say that someone had a son when they were eleven and then a daughter when they were 75, right? If the date of death puts a hole in your assumption...it's probably because of some clerical mistake, one of those things that used to happen before we had administrative professionals day. So while I still likely have ties to the "de Clayton's" I haven't as of yet found the missing link".

I discovered the error in my tracing of my Clayton lineage by rechecking information. However, the de Clayton line wasn't the only line I had traced back that far, there was another name that entered the equation that was even more intriguing: Plantagenet. Now THERE is a family name that if you can tap into, you will find your relationships with all sorts of kings.

And once you've gone that far, your link to Charlemagne is intact- the holy grail of genealogical research. I was determined to find a confident link between Charlemagne and myself. I knew there was a few leaps of family assumption but confident I would be able to find the link. Once again I was bubbling with emotion. I truly was the descendant of Charlemagne. Who wouldn't be proud.

Silly me. As it turns out we're ALL related to Charlemagne. Sure it's a bit disappointing but the whole ancestry.com process is a lot of fun. I learned a lot about my English heritage and have since purchased a Flag of England I proudly display at my home.

Adios cousin.