The Path to Charlemagne

 In the last post I included a picture from a book from the Alabama Department of Archives and History:

This is an important document as it shows the link from the Cary branch of the Pratt Family Tree up to some very important figures in European history.  I believe the link up the McCullough branch to John Cary who married Elizabeth Godfrey in Massachusetts is accurate based on all of the documents I've seen on Ancestry, and I went through each name on this document and was able to verify the details through various sites such as Find a Grave and Wikipedia.  So I believe this document to be historically accurate.

As you can see at the top of the document, the line goes all the way up past Charlemagne to Pepin I. Now of course, millions of people today can trace their lineage to Charlemagne.  He's not called "The Father of Europe" for nothing! Yes, he did unite Western Europe. He is said to have fathered " eighteen children with seven of his ten known wives or concubines" and "most if not all established European noble families ever since can genealogically trace some of their background to Charlemagne." A study was done in 1999 that for the most part concluded that everyone with European ancestry alive today can likely be traced back to Charlemagne.  This study in 2013 confirmed the same thing. So, this isn't the most amazing find in the world.

While it may be true that anyone with European heritage can claim Charlemagne as an ancestor, actually seeing the path from yourself to Charlemagne is pretty neat, and while I was going down this rabbit hole I found some fairly interesting things along the way.

The first was the link to King Edward I that I mentioned in the last post.

Here is the another branch into royalty that I found: David I, King of Scots.  

I find this link to be particularly interesting, because when my DNA results came back, one of the biggest portions (20%) was Scottish.  This really surprised me because I have never once heard of my family having a Scottish heritage. But if you really think about it, it shouldn't be that surprising because the people of this region all moved around and intermingled with each other.

The 6 other regions listed below are Germanic Europe (16%), Wales (11%), England and Northwestern Europe (10%), Sweden and Denmark (9%), Southern Italy (8%), and Finland (1%).  So the majority of my DNA is from  Northewestern Europe.

Lets start where I left off before, with Elizabeth Plantagenet, the daughter of Edward I.  She was married to a Humphrey de Bohun.  

Bohun himself is a pretty interesting person.  He fought against Robert the Bruce (remember Braveheart?), King of Scots in the early 1300s and fourth great-grandson of David I.  Everyone was pretty much related back then so it's not surprising to find cousins fighting each other here. Bohun also took part in the rebellion against King Edward II in 1322, who was his wife's brother and said the sibling she was closest to.

Anyway, if you go up the Bohun line five generations you get to Humphrey de Bohun III, who was married to Lady Margaret de Huntingdon, who was the daughter of Henry de Huntingdon, otherwise known as Henry of Scotland who was son of David I.  David was part of the House of Dunkeld, which ruled Scotland for hundreds of years from ~1000s-1300s.

I am quite certain I could follow numerous branches off of the ones that I have described so far and find many other historical characters and great stories. I feel like I need to really brush up on my medieval English history just to catch up here.  

Let's finish this up with the path to Charlemagne.  Starting with Lady Margaret de Huntingdon listed above, and her father Henry. He was married to Ada De Warenne, who was the great-granddaughter of Henry I of France.  Her father was William de Warenne who was married to Isabel Vermandois Beaumont.   Isabel's father was Hugh the Great, son of Henry I.

Henry I was of course son of Robert II, who was son of Hugh Capet, who was son of another Hugh the Great.  This Hugh the Great was married to Hedwig of Saxony, who in the document above is listed as "Matilda of Saxony."  Her father was Henry The Fowler, who father was Otto the Illustrious. 

Otto's wife was Hedwig of Babenberg, but here is where I run into a problem with the graphic.  It goes from Hedwig to Helingardis who "married Arnulf King of Germany."  In my research I have a hard time finding any information on Helingardis.  Some pages I found say she was a concubine, not a wife of Arnulf.  His wife was Oda.  So while this lineage may be true, I don't like it trusting just this one document.

In addition, there is an easier and more direct way to get to Charlemagne. Let's go back to the second Hugh the Great.  His father was Robert I, which makes his mother Beatrice of Vermandois.  Her father was Herbert I, whose father was Pepin II.  His father was Bernard of Italy, whose father was Pepin of Italy, who's father (you guessed it!) was Charlemagne.

So there you have it. Clear as mud, right?