Quest for the Conqueror

I’m a nerd. I think I’ve already established that fact. So it should come as no surprise that I enjoy nerdy girl things, like spending hours on ancestry.com exploring all the research that my grandmother (and many others) have poured over on our family tree.

Last night I stayed up way too late in a quest to verify our family connection to William the Conqueror, First Norman King of England, son of Robert, The Magnificent (aka The Devil), Duke of Normandy. You see, as a nerdy girl, I am also a card-carrying super fan-girl of the HistorWTC Fam Treey Chanel’s series Vikings, and if you watch, you may know that William the Conqueror was the (5X) great grandson of Rollo the Viking. And that’s really exciting to me.

Every family tree has some knotholes. Mine has LOTS. We have civil-war deserters. We have British spies during the Revolutionary war. We have gamblers, tramps, thieves, and much worse. We also have royalty, vikings, clans in kilts, butchers, nurses, farmers… we have everything. In short, my family is a good cross-section of the DNA of any other American.

Looking over the generations has been fun. Seeing the images of centuries-old handwriting has been fascinating. Draft cards, census records, marriage and death certificates, photos of everything from children, statues, gravestones, castles to cabins have intrigued me and sparked a narrative that will play in my mind for hours to come. I’m a nerd, and that’s what I do.

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