Curators at work: Anglo-Normans

I work mainly with the early Normans before they conquered England: The Dukes of Normandy from William I of England and back to the Nordic earls, as well as their spouses and families.

There are many errors and misunderstandings in this area, so it will take time to get it all in order.

Families: de Crépon (Gunnor was married to Richard 'Sans-Peur') and also connected to the first Montgommerys.

Hello! I am a curator and will be working primarily on the following families from the above list:
* d' Aubigny (or Albini) (two families: Lords of Arundel and Belvoir)  ;
* de Beaumont ;
* Bigod ;
* de Bohun (Boone) ;
* de Braose;
* de Clare ;
* de Goz /d'Avranches  ;
* de Grandmesnil ;
* Malet  ;
* Meschin / de Meschines/ de Bayeux (Lords of Chester) ;
* de Tosny /Toeni/ Toni (Lords of Stafford) ;
* de Warenne (Warren) (Lords of Sussex);
Also
Taillebois
de Vermandois
de Gournay

This will take quite a while, so please bear with u.

The main thing I would like to ask everyone is to be VERY cautious when "stacking" and to make sure that they are of the same generation with same parents, same spouse, same children and same dates. EVEN THOUGH PEOPLE MAY APPEAR TO HAVE THE SAME NAME, we find a proliferation of not only multiple generations but multiple family lines of William d'Aubigny, for example--and they are constantly getting merged with each other, which makes separating them extremely difficult.

Over the next month or two we'll be working on building Master Profiles for each well-known family member, so if you can be adding information in the About Me sections from the Medieval Lands database (please be sure to always include the link--thanks) and other *historical* sources, that would be helpful. There are references to these families in many good historical sources available not only in libraries but also online through Googlebooks, etc. but we need someone to transcribe some of that information to make it digital, so that would be appreciated as well.

Thanks!

Pam

I have been working on the Greys and on the Five Isabels, listed below.

- Isabel Princess of Scotland, (1195 – 1203) daughter of William I of Scotland and his wife Ermengard; married Roger de Bigod, 4th Earl of Norfolk. Half sisters.
- Isabel of Scotland (1180-1251). daughter of William I of Scotland and his mistress Isabel Avenal. Married Robert 'Furfan' de Ros.
- Isabel d' Aubigny of Belvoir married Robert de Ros of Helmsley. Robert of Helmsley is the grandson of Robert 'Furfan'
- Isabel d'Aubigny of Arundel, daughter of William d'Aubigny of Arundel and Maud of Chester (1178 - ?); married John fitzAlan
- Isabel of Huntingdon, daughter of David of Scotland, 8th Earl of Huntingdon and Maud of Chester (1171-1203); married Robert Bruce, 4th Lord of Annandale. David and William are brothers.

primary source for these is http://www.geneajourney.com/aubigny2.html and http://www.geneajourney.com/aubigny1.html

Hi,
I too am a curator and am working from William I "the Conqueror" down through the Plantagenets but will for the moment be working in the area of William I and Henry I and their children as this is in such a tangle.

Wonderful, Anne Marit! This work is fantastic and effects many of us who are Nordske to the bone! I am so weary of looking up my ancestors, just to discover he/she had 100 spouses and 300 children and no one knows where they fit in the tangled mess...
So, once again, thank you and all the curators for your hard work! You will make Geni hummmmm for the world!

Anne Marit! This is just Great! Thank you! It's been fascinating and great fun for me to discover the many antecedents, and more than half of those names I recognize. Amazing! If there is any way I can help, please let me know. Merci beaucoup! Kitty Milloy, San Diego, CA

Thanks, Kitty and Michael!

Terr, Janet and Anne Marit--you will get a chuckle out of this (well, when you're not crying and wringing your hands). Here's the kind of mess we're desperately trying to fix. And I quote from the profile (no, I'm NOT making this up):

William "Strong Hand" Daubigny III is your 17th great uncle's mother's husband's sister.

William "Brito" II d'Aubigny, Baron of Belvoir (d'Albini) (1116 - 1167)
Birth: 1116 - Norfolk, United Kingdom
Death: 1167 (51) - Surrey, United Kingdom
Occupation: Baron of Belvoir
Immediate Family:

Daughter of William "Brito" d'Aubigny, Lord of Belvoir (d'Albini), William "Pincerna" d'Aubigny, Lord of Buckenham and Master Butler of the Royal household, William De Toeni, Cecily (Cicely) Bigod, Heiress of Belvoir (de Bigod), Maud (Mary) Bigod and Maud (de St. Liz)

Wife of Adeliza de Brabant van Leuven, Matilda (Maud) De FitzRobert de Senlis, Adalize Unknown and Cecile Mrs Aubigny...

From the About Me it APPEARS that this is supposed to be the son of Maud St. Liz and one of the William d'Aubigny's (though it says William de Toeni) and that his wife is supposed to be Adalize ???.

I need to figure out WHICH William this is supposed to be and then unravel and detach him from all the wrong connections caused when well-meaning Geni users merged him with several other William d'Aubigny's.

I have a few of these lines in my "offline" family tree that is up to date.

When I started GENI three years ago, the initial import I did had only back 5 or 6 generations (about 1300 profiles). Now I have my current and up to date research completed offline, I want to update my Geni Tree.

I've never merged anything before, and I've only started merging profiles in the last few days - all within the last 150 years of people being born.

Whats's the best way for me to add or import my current and up to date research with Anglo-Norman lineage back into the tree?

I want to, as Pam noted, be "VERY cautious when 'stacking'".

Edward,
you can NOT presently add an additional GEDCOM to an existing tree, without jumping through hoops.

The easiest and BEST way to proceed, though, would be to find the profile of the nearest to present-time person that you have that is already in the big-tree, and connect to that. No need to add too many profiles and then only have to merge them...

Edward, I appreciate your efforts and our tree would benefit from your research. I would suggest finding the "master-profiles-in-progress" (though they are not yet designated as such, they are usually the ones with the most managers, and starting with one of them in any family line, going through by hand, profile by profile, and checking the existing profile's information against what you have. If you desire, you can contact one of us curators working on these lines and request to be added as a manager. Where you see discrepancies, then you can add research information, comments, etc. in the About Me section, add source information, or--if the relationships are incorrect--provide one of us with your case about the correct relationships and ask to have it corrected after we review the information.

This may seem time consuming, but it is MUCH more likely to result in a better tree for all of us than just adding another set of duplicates. And we need good, solid researchers to help us out on these early medieval trees.

Thanks!

Pam

I'm posting this on the other discussion thread, but thought it would be helpful here, too. The community that worked on the GEN-MEDIEVAL-L rootsweb list was very scholarly, and some of the best discussions about medieval family relationships may be found here. The archives is searchable: http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/index/GEN-MEDIEVAL

Reginald de Braose, 9th Baron Abergavenny

wives are messed up, generations seem confused, sources needed. I'll check back here when my plate seems less full.

Janet, I don't have time to work on it right now, but we'll see who gets there first!

As for sources:

Let's be sure to use the FMG Medieval Lands database as the primary source wherever possible, and then see if we can find more sources from historians and medieval scholars (there are many on Google Books). As we all know, the user-generated websites are infamously unreliable.

I am working off and on with the Counts d'Anjou (slightly pre-conquest -- 800 1100 AD) and I am also working on the FitzHamon-deMontgomery line. Their daughter married one of Henry I's illegitimate sons.

If any one is looking for a project in this era, pick any ONE family from Ann-Marit's excellent list and dig in.

I have moved on to the Courtenays.

Hello, friends. I'm in the midst of unstacking a stack of about 30 profiles in which a number of different Walkelin de Ferrers/Ferrieres and William de Ferrers were merged together. Some profiles said Walkelin (William) de Ferrers, and some misspelled Walcheline as Malcheline. My gut feeling was that these were at least two separate men, so I looked it up and found that there were indeed at least *three* distinct Walkelins in the Ferrers family, as Wikipedia explains in a disambiguation page.

Walkelin de Ferrers may refer to:

* Walkeline or Gaucheline de Ferrières (d.c. 1040), 11th century Seigneur of Ferrières-Saint-Hilaire and father of Henry de Ferrers and forefather of the Ferrers family of England:http://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/ENGLISHNOBILITYMEDIEVAL3D-K.htm Ch. 7 Ferrers

* Walchelin de Ferriers, 12th century lord of Oakham Castle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walchelin_de_Ferriers

* Walkelin de Ferrers de Derby, 12th century lord of Egginton, Derbyshire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkelin_de_Derby

The only problem is that even though there is this wonderful profile of Walkelin of Derby (married to Goda de Toeni) in Wikipedia, I don't find him listed in the FMG.

On the soc.gen.medieval message board I found a discussion about him but Peter Stewart, one of the regular medievalists in that group, stated:

Goda de Tosny married Walchelin, seigneur of Ferrières-Saint-Hilaire & lord
of Oakham (died in or after 1189). ... I don't think she is recorded to
have had any other husband. Her father Robert is conjectured to have been a
son of Raoul V, seigneur of Tosny (died 1162) by Margaret de Beaumont whose
father was a first cousin of Robert de Neufbourg. The latter's wife Godeheut
is said to have been a daughter of Raoul IV of Tosny (died 1126) by Alice
of Northumberland.

He followed up with a later note:

As for ... Walkelin, "in or after 1189" was not exactly right:
he was on crusade at the same time as his William, having arrived in
Palestine in July 1190, and he was still living on 7 September 1191. As far
as I know he was not recorded again after that date.

So Stewart seems to conflate the latter two Walkelins listed above.

The research in Wikipedia on The Derby School seems quite compelling though.

What do you all think?

Oh woe!

That seems like a very hard thing to try to figure out.

To bad there's not someone inside the Vatican that has access to the library. I bet there are documents there on most royalty etc that would be very usefull in researching the trees that are no where else and more accuate and credible than any other documents!

We now have several projects devoted to the Normans and Anglo Normans, with more to come. There's a Magna Carta Sureties project, a Domesday Book project, a Wreck of the White Ship Project, a Normans prior to 1066 project.... Browse the projects list at www.geni.com/project and let me know if there's one that you might be interested in contributing to.

We are supposed to get Project-based discussions up and running soon, which will be attached to each project.

Pam

Please note - you cannot use "United Kingdom" for any dates before 1709.

Well noted, Reg--that is one that irks me as well, and I try to change that wherever I see it in medieval profiles to the proper country, such as Wales or England...

Pam

Keep up the good work.

I am trying to sort out the “le Bigot” family as they crop up quite a lot in my family tree, and there is a lot of conflicting or wrong information listed on the web.
I will post problem that I cannot resolve myself as I find them
The first problem is the family of Cicely le Bigod [1106-1134]
Cicely married William d'Aubigny [1102-1157]
They are listed as having a son Ralph who is listed as being born in 1110
Ralph is listed as Ralph d’ Aubigny, Ralph de Brito and Ralph d’ Aubigny de Brito
The question is now – should Ralph de Brito [the father of Cecily de Brito 1135-1171] be listd or shown as the son of William d'Aubigny & Cicely le Bigod
And did William d'Aubigny & Cicely le Bigod have a son Ralph d’ Aubigny

We need source data on this one I think!

Hi Reg. I'm the curator working on this. In fact, we have a project that you can join:

http://www.geni.com/projects/Anglo-Norman-families-Earls-of-Norfolk...

and also the d'Aubigny project at http://www.geni.com/projects/The-d-Aubigny-and-de-Albini-families-o...

According to Cawley, whose work is extremely reliable, Cecily and William "Brito" d'Aubigny did have a son Ralph who died on Crusade in 1191:

RALPH de Albini Brito (-Acre 1191). "Willielmus de Albineio" donated "ecclesiam de Redmelina" to Belvoir monastery, Lincolnshire, with the consent of "Willielmi filii et hæredis mei et Matildis uxoris meæ et Ceciliæ matris meæ, necnon et Radulphi de Albinei fratris mei", by undated charter[1053].

Source is Dugdale Monasticon II, Belvoir Monastery, Lincolnshire, IX, p. 290.

I'm another descendant of several Anglo-Norman lines. I am planning to look at this branch of the family in the near future, or at least I promised Pam that I would! In this branch of the family I see de Bohun and de Toeni and in addition de Warren, de Beauchamp, de Say, and de Montfort. The discussion is very helpful because I have not ventured into the Anglo-Normans but have been living with the Lithuanian Jewish, Argentinian Jewish and Mayflower/Great Migration WASP branches until now!

anyone have any source material on the family de graffham / grafham of which i am descended?

a snippet i found is

"The family of Grafham held the subtenancy of the half knight's fee under the Earls of Gloucester. This family has been identified with that of Engaine owing to the similarity of the christian names of some of its members and the fact that some of the members are called 'le noble de Grafham.' If it were a younger branch of the Engaine family it must have split off at an early date, as William de Grafham is mentioned in 1166"

Reg, here is the master Profile for that Ralph d'Aubigny Brito:

Ralph de Albini Brito, seigneur de Ingleby

Jason, I'm not familiar with the Grafham family. I'll be interested to see what you find out.

Pam - Problem

The origin of the Earls of Arundel was Aubigny, in the arondissemont of Coutances, dept. of La Manche. It is also stated that they never bore such a name as "de Albini". There is also no connection of the d'Aubigny Earls of Arundel with the Lords of Belvoir. This has confused many historians and genealogists, and erroneously inspired many creative attempts to connect them. The only actual connection beween these two distinct families, is that a William of each line, living as contemporaries, married sisters, both daughters of Roger Bigod.