Olaf II "the Black", King of Isle of Man - Change to wife and children

Don't we have the "...Olavsdottir" theory traced down to the 1811 book by J. Johnson?
I don't know if we'll ever get further than that.

https://wiki.geni.com/index.php/Skancke_and_the_Isle_of_Man#The_sto...

Is Dugdale's writeup consistent with the "chronicle of the Kings of Man"? (I'm not sure if that's a specific document or a "mythological source").

Different daughter. This is the one who supposedly married Ottarr Snaekollson. She is theorized to account for the idea that the Gunns are descended from Olaf.

That is, Gunni, the ancestor of the Gunns, is said to have been a son of Olaf, but that's a mistake. To account for the mistake there is a theory that Gunni's grandson Ottarr married a daughter of Olaf.

Similarly, Leod, the ancestor of the Macleods, is said to have been a son of Olaf, but that's also a mistake. To account for the mistake there is a theory that Leod married a daughter of Olaf. But in this case, I don't think we have anyone linked on Geni.

I don't know why the two theories are not symmetrical. Looking into that.

The Chronicle of Man is a real manuscript source. The main part was composed about 1261 or 1262, so it is reasonably contemporary. About 25 years after these events..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicles_of_Mann

I checked two different translations. Although they are a bit different, they tell the same story of Olaf's three marriages. All under the entry for 1222. Both of them make the same mistake as transcribing 2nd wife Jauon (Joan) as Lavon. Neither of them names the 1st wife, but both describe her as a cousin of Jauon.

https://books.google.com/books?id=VHRbAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA22&lpg=...

http://www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/manxsoc/msvol22/p074.htm

I checked the Chronicle for Leod, Guin, and Leanders, because I wanted to be sure Skene (1837) was right that they don't appear there (despite generations of citations). They really don't.

But, I didn't notice this piece -- under the entry for 1237 where Olaf dies, he is succeeded by his son Harald who is said to be 14. A little math would put Harald's birth about 1223, or just after Olaf's marriage to Christina. And, if Harald, the eldest, was son of Christina, then it seems likely his younger brothers were also her sons.

Hard to believe Dugdale was wrong about something so obvious, but it seems he was.

Hm. Makes some sense. Dissolving a marriage was unusual, but this sequence makes sense:
- Olaf marries Christina
- Marriage turns out to be childless, Olaf blames the wife, and negotiates another marriage into the same family,
- Bishop uses the kinship thing as a tool to attack that marriage (also childless)
- Olaf, in desperation, marries a third, unrelated wife
- Children arrive

But yes, it's very surprising that generations of historians assigned the children to the first wife in that case.

Do any of the sources say that the first marriage was ended by death or by divorce?

The sequence implied but not explicitly stated is:

1. Olaf has an unknown wife or concubine.
2. Olaf's half-brother king Ragnvald has him marry Jauon / Lavon, who was a sister of Ragnvald's wife. Clearly a political move.
3. After just a month or two, the bishop (who happens to be Olaf's nephew) makes him divorce her because she was a "cousin German" (1st cousin) of his Olaf's first wife. (Olaf says "concubine", bishop says "wife".) A political counter-move.
4. Olaf marries unrelated Christina.
5. Ragnvald's wife is ticked at the way her sister has been treated, so she has her son try to kill Olaf.

No sign anywhere about what happened to the first wife.

Wikpedia expresses doubt about of Olaf's wives is the mother of his children. That's a bit surprising, I think, but the sources are good. On Geni, we might want to take the cautious route and move all the kids to "Unknown Partner" (strict interpretation), or we can leave them attached to Christina (plain reading of what is implied by the source).

My main interest here is to get Leod, Gunn, and Leanders out of the way of the cross-fire over the Skancke family.

Ever since the 1600s people have been saying that Leod, Gunn, and Leanders appear in the Manx chronicle as sons of Olaf. Except they don't. Skene made this point back in 1837 -- they aren't there, really they aren't, stop saying it -- but he seems to have been ignored.

I've been putting together some info on this problem. A lot of hours so far, but it's not a Geni emergency, I don't think, since no one is arguing in favor of them. Yet.

I see no reason not to cut those relationships.

For the convenience of readers, it might be nice to have links in the "about me" to the particular Leod, Gunn and Leander that Olaf is accused of having fathered, so that people will recognize the bad theory next time it's entered by a duplicator.

Not quite that easy, but I'm trying to figure out how to do something like that.

There is a clear Leod, ancestor of the Macleods, but the confusion might involve an unrelated Ljotr who was actually connected to Gunni, except that there are two different Gunnis who might have been ancestor of the Gunns, and some of the story might involve confusion with a third Gunni.

It's a problem of simplifying for clarity without being deceptive.

That's the kind of situation where I write pages on the wiki :-)

The piece I'm writing is headed for the Macleod and Gunn projects. I like your wiki pages but projects seem to me to be more intuitive and accessible.

Yep, if projects had subpages I'd probably move the wiki stuff there. As it is, I don't like the fact that when I dig into an underlying issue of an underlying issue of a project, I have to edit the "main" page of the project.

But if projects had subpages, they'd be close to being wikis....