Is This A Genealogy Of Biblical Proportions?

How far back can you expect to travel in your genealogical quests? Will you find the rich and famous, saints or sinners? On a regular basis, readers send me questions or share successes and failures. Sometimes I know my response to the questions or comments would benefit a lot of you, so they are the impetus for columns.

Carol Klein-Buckingham of Tampa really got me thinking when she asked, "Can anyone go back to Jesus?" Her e-mail was filled with humor and clever quips so I wasn't sure how seriously to take her question.

She first wrote that "recently on Ancestry.com I started following my mom's grandfather's line back to Virginia, then to England. Before I knew it, we were at 1099 and in Normandy, on and on it went - France to Germany to Denmark to Sweden. ... I was amazed at A.D. 500, A.D. 400, A.D. 300, A.D. 200, finally there I was at A.D. 100 ... and so I wondered, how in the name of genealogy can anyone go back to Jesus?"

She told me that her search on Ancestry listed her Danish and Swedish ancestors as living in "Arkansas" in A.D. 200. Concerned by what she might be finding, I asked for some of the links she had used so I could check this nearly miraculous ancestry she had found.

THE Joseph? And Junior, Too?

If ever there was a tangled web, this was it. I got lost just looking at one line of it, but sure enough, it did go back to what someone has entered as "Joseph, father of Jesus" and "Mary the Virgin." This genealogy showed only one child of that union: Joseph Arimathea. Jesus was not mentioned, but perhaps the compiler of this lineage thought that went without saying.

This compiler did give a date of birth for Joseph as the year 100 in Bethlehem. The date alone makes the relationship questionable: How could Jesus have a brother born 100 years after he was? I am not a scholar of the Bible, but this was the first time I had seen Joseph Arimathea linked as the son of Joseph and Mary, although some have speculated that he might have been related to Jesus. According to medieval legend, Joseph took the Holy Grail containing the blood of Jesus to England.

The Ancestry genealogy doesn't show who Joseph married, but it does identify his daughter as Anna A. Druids, who married "The Blessed Bran," who was born in the year 100 in "Canada."

There are many variations of stories about The Blessed Bran, a supernatural heroic giant in early Celtic narratives of Britain. He was said to have been the son of Llyr, the supernatural king of the sea, and a mortal woman named Penardun.

At this point, of course, common sense is screaming at me that a Celtic giant could not have been born in Canada.

This genealogy continued that Anna and the Bran's son, P. Prasutugu, was born in the year 61 in England and married Boadicea, Queen of Britain. Ancient history records that Boadicea was queen of the Iceni, a Celtic tribe during the Roman occupation, and that she did marry a King Prasutugu. The question is whether or not the couple fits into this particular family. No proof or sources are included in the online information.

This genealogy winds and spins through several generations to include Helen de la Croix, who married Flavius Valerius Constantius. Many legends surround Helen, who tradition says married Constantius Chlorus. He divorced her but not before she gave birth to a son, Constantine, who became the emperor of the Roman Empire.

Helen subsequently was canonized by the Catholic Church and is the patron saint of archeologists. Surely, if her lineage could be traced from Joseph and Mary, the Catholic Church would have promoted that point.

The genealogy continued to include Henry II through his son John to his daughter Joan and then 12 generations to an Edward Phillips, who migrated to Virginia and died there in 1710. Henry II did have a son, John Plantagenet. The biggest problem with this part of the genealogy is that his daughter Joan, at age 11, married Alexander of Scotland and died without children. This causes a big disconnect with the next 12 generations.

Klein-Buckingham closed her e-mail by saying "something isn't right." What an understatement!

It takes a long time to research and compile a legitimate, well-documented genealogy. It takes only a few hours on the Internet or in the history section of the local library to tear apart a string of names linked together without proof of their relationships.

Applause And Amazement

I applaud Klein-Buckingham for realizing something wasn't right. Actually, my question became, "Is anything right with this genealogy?"

I am amazed that people think they can "do their family history" in a single afternoon on the Internet.

There are many stories of genealogy research spanning years. Grandchildren struggle to complete the genealogy previous generations began, striving just to prove a single ancestor migrating from Europe. Most of us would never fool ourselves that we even could live long enough to prove direct descent from Joseph and Mary.

I can't give Klein-Buckingham a definitive answer to whether anyone can trace ancestors to Jesus. I can say that I find it very hard to believe. Although this particular example is highly entertaining, it also is sad that anyone would spend so much time to put something online that obviously is so poorly researched or an outright spoof.

No sources are cited for any of the relationships purported in this lineage. It certainly serves as a caution sign that you cannot take anyone on the Internet at face value.

I suspect most family researchers would not fall for this particular genealogy, filled with ancestors born in North America as early as A.D. 200 as well as individuals of mythical stature, documented only by decades of verbal legend. There are many valuable records and some well-done genealogies on Ancestry.com, but this isn't one of them.