I often feel like I’m shortchanging the editors and contributors in listing only my highlights of magazine issues. There’s content on every page of interest to someone, maybe you. But not every item speaks to me. So below, after pointing to two highlight articles, I’m reproducing the complete contents page from the January issue of Family Tree. As you can see from a glance at the cover, it is designed to attract the Christmas shopper.
Who Would Be King or Queen? details what is known about descendants of many of the kings and queens back as far as Alfred the Great. It also looks are the various parts of the UK and Ireland when they had their own royal lines and how things might have changed if the rules of sucession had been different including for illegitimate children. There are many cases where there was no surviving child, and also many where there were multiple survivours.
Statistically we’re all descendants of Charlemagne, and there’s a high probability of descent from Edward I as younger children and their descendants married outside the aristocracy.
The article has a section referring to a gateway ancestor, one who has a well documented, and hopefully accurate, pedigree. That’s a term I’d only previously heard referring to some early US settlers. The same could be true in the UK, but the example given is a US person with links to royalty in the UK.
Printed adjacent to the article is an ad for the new second edition of the book The Royal Descents of 900 Immigrants to the American Colonies, Quebec, or the United States, by Gary Boyd Roberts, available from genealogical.com.
Graham Caldwell’s case study A big birth cover up
Exposed… 139 YEARS LATER! includes the tips that a surname given as a middle name of an illegitimate child could be the father’s surname; if you find a mystery baby on the census the address might turn up other clues and; British travel distances between locations can be found searching Google maps or directly from the Google search page usingDISTANCE address + UK TO address + UK which brings it up, and a map. That works for Canada too.
I am fairly lucky as I have a subscription with this magazine, so I will not miss out on any articles or the fact that they also run a site FamilyTree Plus which has additional material worth subscribing to.
I will say though that there are many articles, blogs etc that I may not subscribe to and without you brining them to our attention would pass me by, so thank you for that.
I’m looking forward to this issue – very curious about the spotlight on the FHUG – as I user of Family Historian, I’m a regular on the website.
Hoping the magazine will show up at the library soon – I watch every day as the mail gets unloaded 🙂