I’ve become the family historian without ever asking to be. My grandma used to be the family historian. She went and hunted down our family history through the scottish royal society or whatever and collected any newspaper clipping or shitty photograph of us she ever could. Then when she moved into the nursing home she looked at like 12yo me and was like “you’re the family historian now” like I was just gonna be the bearer of the curse or w/e. So now I’M spending my time digging through archives and fuckin census data from 1000 years ago and getting little prints of paintings of my descendants from when mf jesus was still fucking about
Ppl asking how I got this far back: my family has been keeping good records for like 300 years. Plus, certain family members were members of the royal court, which is surprisingly common btw. (Most people are related at some point to royalty. When you consider the average person has like 5 kids, and then they all have 5 kids and so on, a single great grandparent can have like 100+ great grandchildren easily, multiply that by 10 generations and you have millions of direct descendants). Anyway. Being members of a royal court allows you certain advantages like literacy and family record keeping which helps a LOT when doing research. I was able to trace, with relative confidence, back to about 1200 CE. At that things start getting fuzzy as literacy rates (in Europe) drop, and records are harder to find. I was able to find one lineage of Scottish/Irish royalty that was really well documented and that was how I was able to get back so far. However with a lot lower confidence as most of the records are wrapped in folklore and written down in like. One place only so there’s no cross-referencing available
