Quote Originally Posted by Cawdorian View Post
Warning!!!!

... The records that have been preserved and found from that period are those of our ancestors who owned land and/or were titled. I don't what happened to the records of the common folks, my guess is they are very far and few between.

....
Right. The common folk and poorer people rarely left records. The records are essentially documents that memorialize the transference of wealth, such as wills, marriages (especially of heiresses or potential heiresses), deeds and grants of various sorts, etc. So, no wealth usually meant no records. Thus, since most of our ancestors were probably impoverished peasants (by far the bulk of humanity until modern times), we will probably never know very much about most of them. On the other hand, the further back you able to go, the more likely you are to run into land-owning gentry, who usually descend from aristocracy who in turn descend from royalty, who are well documented. The trick is having the perserverance to continue the work.

(Not that I think there is anything special about having royal or aristocratic ancestry, other than it makes filling in the blanks in genealogical research a whole lot easier. As we discussed last weekend, I find that the rogues and scoundrels usually had much more interesting life stories.)