Ancient Ties: Finding Your Family's Ancestry

 

Perhaps you have travelled to Europe and fell in love with the old stone castles, or have come across a family coat-of-arms and were mesmerized by the beauty of the intricately woven and hand-tinted heraldry. Often there is a reason why some things draw us or are somehow familiar to us, like we know them from some past life. Often, when these things are pursued they do have a part in our past, and our family’s history is often the key that unlocks this mystery.
In 1226 the Templar Order leased a small village in Silesia to a patrician family, who built a church there and named it after themselves, Bankowo or Bankau. This family were also patricians of the nearby town of Breslau, and laid the foundation for its town hall. Today, Breslau – now called Wroclaw – is one of the largest cities in Poland, and in its national museum still hangs a painting from the 16th century, which depicts the coat-of-arms of this family, the Banck or von Banck family, my family.

It was my 23rd Great-Grandfather, Michael von Bancke, whose family line descended through fortuitous paths, down to the house of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, to Queen Victoria and ultimately to the present day royal houses of Europe. Through My 23rd Great-Grandfather, Queen Elizabeth II is my 22nd cousin, and Prince William my 24th cousin. But it is through researching the journeys of my family through Europe and through history that facts took on the vibrant hues of human life, joy and pain, tragedy and victory. There were ancestors who were imprisoned in Venice and entries in the Holy Roman Empire’s Regesta Imperii, denoting that my family was granted permission to buy a castle from a knight, and complaining to the Holy Roman Emperor that his nephew, the Archduke of Austria, had borrowed money and not paid it back. These stories show the tendencies, tenacity and tastes of a family, and form a heritage carried by its descendants, today.

When beginning a family ancestry research project, the place most people begin is their own grandfathers and grandmothers, working back generation by generation. Although this provides interesting information about people whom the researcher may know or know about, often this leads to dead ends due to a lack of documentation, migrations or interruptions such as revolutions or wars.

When searching for your own family’s history, it may be beneficial to search instead for the pedigree or heritage of your family, its noteworthy accomplishments or the stories which reveal the persons and personalities which have contributed to its evolution. Instead of searching backward in history, from the present to the past, perhaps you could try to find the earliest appearance of your family group, who they were and what they did, and then follow their migration or their genealogies down through history to your own, present day, family. Often the early origins of a family are known, although there are no continuous connections that can be traced back. In this way, a few missing generations will not hinder your pursuit of your family’s heritage, the knowledge of what has shaped you and the genetics which you have inherited.