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Originally Posted by jester
It is not entirely impossible to trace family records IF the family had records or there was a means at the time and their survived. To date we have traced all of the branches of my family to before they came to the New World, the oldest confrmed was a tax collector in Paris in the 15th Century and one of his younger sons was the first to come to the New World where he worked with or for some Jesuits. From there it was easy since the family didn't leave the area they settled in for several hundred years.
Oh yeah, if your family is lazy and doesn't move for several generations then it is pretty easy to trace them as well  |
You are very much right Jester. However, the thing is that no record had been kept in the western world prior to 800AD (Carlus Magnus). You might get some older records if your ancestry is from Constantinople but I'm not even sure about that. Records might have existed before the destruction of Alexandria's great library but all that is lost and no proof of it remains.
Several European leaders pretended to be heir to some pre-christ famous leaders but all that has always been lies and fantasy on their part. Actually, even if someone effectively has records of previous ancestry, you can be sure that it is a fake (but it may be a very ancient fake). I have worked on fakes from around 1000AD and that is a lot of fun just to know that the piece of history you are working on is the result of some kind of forgery.
I have a friend who can trace her ancestry back to a Bishop that lived sometime around 900AD but that is fairly rare.
A few Muslims can trace it back to about 600AD (to Mahomet, in fact). That's how we know that king of Morocco and king of Jordan are heirs to the prophet.
Asian, both Japanese and Chinese, can go back a lot further as they have retained some very old record. Still Confucius remain the oldest family tree in existence.