Genealogies in great plenty are found in manuscripts and printed volumes from the 16th century onward. Remarkable among these are the descents recorded in the Visitation Books of the heralds, who, armed with commissions from the crown, the first of which was issued in 20 Hen. VIII., perambulated the English counties, viewing arms and registering pedigrees. The notes in their register books range from the simple registration of a man’s name and arms to entries of pedigrees many generations long. To the heralds these visitations were rare opportunities of obtaining fees from the visited, and the value of the pedigrees registered is notably unequal. Although it has always been the boast of the College of Arms that Visitation records may be produced as evidence in the law courts, few of these officially recorded genealogies are wholly trustworthy. Many of the officers of arms who recorded them were, even by the testimony of their comrades, of indifferent character, and even when the visiting herald was an honourable man and an industrious he had little time to spare for the investigation of any single genealogy. Deeds and evidences in private hands may have been hastily examined in some instances—indeed, a herald’s summons invites their production—and monuments were often viewed in the churches, but for the most part men’s memories and the hearsay of the country-side made the backbone of the pedigree. The further the pedigree is carried beyond the memory of living men the less trustworthy does it become. The principal visitations took place in the reigns of Elizabeth, James I. and Charles II. No commission has been issued since the accession of William and Mary, but from that time onwards large numbers of genealogies have been recorded in the registers of the College of Arms, the modern ones being compiled with a care which contrasts remarkably with the unsupported statements of the Tudor heralds.
Outside the doors of the College of Arms genealogy has now been for some centuries a favourite study of antiquaries, whose researches have been of the utmost value to the historian, the topographer and the biographer. County histories, following the example of Dugdale’s Warwickshire folios, have given much space to the elucidation of genealogies and to the amassing of material from which they may be constructed. Dugdale’s great work on the English baronage heads another host of works occupied with the genealogy of English noble families, and the second edition of “G.E.C.’s” Complete Peerage shows the mighty advance of the modern critical spirit. Nevertheless, the 20th century has not yet seen the abandoning of all the genealogical fables nourished by the Elizabethan pedigree-mongers, and the ancestry of many noble houses as recorded in popular works of reference is still derived from mythical forefathers. Thus the dukes of Norfolk, who, by their office of earl marshal are patrons of the heralds, are provided with a 10th-century Hereward for an ancestor; the dukes of Bedford, descendants of a 15th-century burgess of Weymouth, are traced to the knightly house of Russell of Kingston Russell, and the dukes of Westminster to the mythical Gilbert le Grosvenor who “came over in the train of the Conqueror.”
Genealogical research has, however, made great advance during the last generation. The critical spirit shown in such works as Round’s Studies in Peerage and Family History (1901) has assailed with effective ridicule the methods of dishonest pedigree-makers. Much raw material of genealogy has been made available for all by the publication of parish registers, marriage-licence allegations, monumental inscriptions and the like, and above all by the mass of evidences contained in the volumes issued by the Public Record Office.
Within a small space it is impossible to set forth in detail the methods by which an English genealogy may be traced. But those who are setting out upon the task may be warned at the outset to avoid guesswork based upon the possession of a surname which may be shared by a dozen families between whom is no tie of kinship. A man whose family name is Howard may be presumed to descend from an ancestor for whom Howard was a personal name: it may not be presumed that this ancestor was he in whom the dukes of Norfolk have their origin. A genealogy should not be allowed to stray from facts which can be supported by evidence. A man may know that his grandfather was John Stiles who died in 1850 at the age of fifty-five. It does not follow that this John is identical with the John Stiles who is found as baptized in 1795 at Blackacre, the son of William Stiles. But if John the grandfather names in his letters a sister named Isabel Nokes, while the will of William Stiles gives legacies to his son and daughter John Stiles and Isabel Nokes, we may agree that reasonable proof has been given of the added generation. A new pedigree should begin with the carefully tested statements of living members of a family. The next step should be to collate such family records as bible entries, letters and diaries, and inscriptions on mourning rings, with monumental inscriptions of acknowledged members of the family. From such beginnings the genealogist will continue his search through the registers of parishes with which the family has been connected; wills and administrations registered in the various probate courts form, with parish registers, the backbone of most middle-class family histories. Court rolls of manors in which members of the family were tenants give, when existing and accessible, proofs which may carry back a line, however obscure, through many descents. When these have been exhausted the records of legal proceedings, and notably those of the court of chancery, may be searched. Few English households have been able in the past to avoid an appeal to the chancery court, and the bill and answer of a chancery plaintiff and defendant will often tell the story of a family quarrel in which a score of kinsfolk are involved, and the pleadings may contain the material for a family tree of many branching generations. Coram Rege and De Banco rolls may even, in the course of a dispute over a knight’s fee or a manor carry a pedigree to the Conquest of England, although such good fortune can hardly be expected by the searcher out of an undistinguished line. In proving a genealogy it must be remembered that in the descent of an estate in land must be sought the best evidence for a pedigree.
At the present time the study of genealogy grows rapidly in English estimation. It is no less popular in America, where societies and private persons have of late years published a vast number of genealogies, many of which combine the results of laborious research in American records with extravagant and unfounded claims concerning the European origin of the families dealt with. A family with the surname of Cuthbert has been known to hail St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne as its progenitor, and one surnamed Eberhardt has incorporated in its pedigree such German princes of old times as were found to have Eberhardt for a Christian name.
Genealogy in modern France has, with a few honourable exceptions, fallen into the hands of the popular pedigree-makers, whose concern is to gratify the vanity of their employers. Italy likewise has not yet shaken off the influence of those venal genealogists who, three hundred years ago, sold pedigrees cheaply to all comers. But much laborious genealogical inquiry had been made in Germany since the days of Hübner, and even in Russia there has been some attempt to apply modern standards of criticism to the chronicles of the swarming descendants of the blood of Rurik.
In no way is the gap made by the Dark Ages between ancient and modern history more marked than by the fact that no European family makes a serious claim to bridge it with its genealogy. The unsupported claim of the Roman house of Massimo to a descent from Fabius Maximus is respectable beside such legends as that which made Lévis-Mirepoix head of the priestly tribe of Levi, but even the boast of such remote ancestry has now become rare. The ancient sovereign houses of Europe are, for the most part, content to attach themselves to some ancestor who, when the mist that followed the fall of the Western empire begins to lift, is seen rallying with his sword some group of spearmen.
Authorities.—Genealogical works have been published in such abundance that the bibliographies of the subject are already substantial volumes. Amongst the earlier books from the press may be noted Benvenuto de San Georgio’s Montisferrati marchionum et principum regiae propagium successionumque series (1515); Pingonius’s Arbor gentilitiae Sabaudiae Saxoniaeque domus (1521); Gebweiler’s Epitome regii ac vetustissimi ortus Caroli V. et Ferdinandi I., omniumque archiducum Austriae et comitum Habsburgiensium (1527): Meyer’s work on the counts of Flanders (1531), and Du Boulay’s genealogies of the dukes of Lorraine (1547). Later in the same century Reineck of Helmstadt put forth many works having a wider genealogical scope, and we may cite Henninges’s Genealogiae Saxonicae (1587) and Theatrum genealogicum (1598), and Reusner’s Opus genealogicum catholicum (1589-1592). For the politically inconvenient falseness of François de Rosières’ Stemmata Lotharingiae ac Barri ducum (1580), wherein the dukes of Lorraine were deduced from the line of Charlemagne, the author was sent to the Bastille by the parlement of Paris and his book suppressed.
The 17th century saw the production in England of Dugdale’s great Baronage (1675-1676), a work which still holds a respectable place by reason of its citation of authorities, and of Sandford’s history of the royal house. In the same century André Duchesne, the historian of the Montmorencys, Pierre d’Hozier, the chronicler of the house of La Rochefoucauld, Rittershusius, Imhoff, Spener, Lohmeier and many others contribute to the body of continental genealogies. Pierre de Guibours, known as Père Anselme de Ste Marie, published in 1674 the first edition of his magnificent Histoire généalogique de la maison royale de France, des pairs, grands officiers de la couronne et de la maison du roy et des anciens barons du royaume. Of this encyclopaedic work a third and complete edition appeared in 1726-1733. A modern edition under the editorship of M. Potier de Courcy began to be issued in 1873, but remains incomplete. Among 18th-century work Johann Hübner’s Bibliotheca genealogica (1729) and Genealogische Tabellen (1725-1733), with Lenzen’s commentary on the latter work (c. 1756), may be signalized, with Gatterer’s Handbuch der Genealogie (1761) and his Abriss der Genealogie (1788), the latter an early manual on the science of genealogy. Hergott’s Genealogia diplomatica augustae gentis Habsburgicae (1737) is the imperial genealogy compiled by the emperor’s own historiographer.
Modern peerages in England may be said to date from that of Arthur Collins, whose one-volume first edition was published in 1709. The fifth edition appeared in 1778, in eight volumes, to be republished in 1812 by Sir Egerton Brydges, the “Baptist Hatton” of Disraeli’s novel, who corrected many legendary pedigrees, besides inserting his own forged descent from a common ancestor with the dukes of Chandos. From this work and from the Irish peerage of Lodge (as re-edited by Archdall) most of the later peerages have quarried their material. With these may be named the baronetages of Wotton and Betham. Of modern popular peerages and baronetages that of Burke has been published since 1822 in many editions and now appears yearly. Most important for the historian are the Complete Peerage of G.E. C[ockayne] (2nd ed., 1910), and the Complete Baronetage of the same author. The Peerage of Scotland (1769) of Sir Robert Douglas of Glenbervie came to a second edition in 1813, edited by J.P. Wood, and the whole work has been revised and re-edited by Sir James Balfour Paul (1904, &c.). Of the popular manuals of English untitled families, Burke’s Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Commoners (1833-1838) is now brought up to date from time to time and reissued as the Landed Gentry.