(updated November 8, 2002)

Relatives of Note and Interest:

I do think it's clear, though, that ever since the dawn of civilization, ruling families have engineered strategic marriages with neighboring ruling families, so that as centuries and millennia passed, the ruling classes around the world (with the exception of those in impossibly remote areas) have had many common ancestors. That's not to say that ruling class blood did not flow downward to "common" folk (indeed, that's how I got MINE!), or that "common" blood did not flow upward.  Often persons of peasant origins would become military heroes or leaders for other reasons.  But all in all, noble families of today -- be they in India, Morocco, England, Spain, or elsewhere -- are related, however distant, and probably carry within them the genes even of the pharoahs of Egypt.

Mere Coincidence???

At least three times in the past, my mother's and father's ancestors have come geographically very close -- a surprising fact when one considers that my father's family comes exclusively from a limited area of southeastern Italy, while most of my mother's family arrived in the United States in the early 1600s and otherwise since about the 1400s hails from northern Europe. The most recent time my father's and mother's families nearly crossed paths was in the 1910s and 1920s, when my paternal grandparents lived in western West Virginia. My mother's parents lived literally several miles away, across the river in Ohio. They may have passed each other on the roads or stood in line beside one another in stores.

A hundred years earlier, my mother's ancestors moved briefly to Oneida County in New York State, where my father's family would later move and where my father would grow up, marry my mother and raise a family.

Finally, over 900 years ago, my maternal ancestor Robert Guiscard conquered and ruled Puglia, where my father's ancestors lived.

List of various occupations of my ancestors