466 Mr. W. C. D. Whefham [May '6, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 

 Friday, May 3, 1912. 



Sir James Crichtox Browne, J.P. M.D. LL.D. D.Sc. F.R.S.. 

 Treasurer and Vice-President, in the Chair. 



W. C. D. Whetham, Esq., M.A. F.R.S. 



The Use of Pedigrees. 



Interest in ancestors, their qualities, their work and their lives, is a 

 deep-rooted and healthy instinct in mankind. The achievements of 

 one's forefathers are a keen incentive to an honourable and strenuous 

 life ; their faults and failings are a warning and a danger signal in 

 the path. Desire to prove a distinguished descent has led to the 

 discovery, and one may add the invention, of many remarkable pedi- 

 grees. 



Few authentic pedigrees, even of our oldest families, begin before 

 the latter half of the twelfth century, though numerous claims of 

 Norman and Saxon descent are made. Many of these claims are 

 founded on an agreement between the Christain n^me of some Saxon 

 chief, sufficiently prominent to satisfy the ambition of the claimant, 

 and the surname, long afterwards adopted by the descendants of 

 some obscure person, who chanced to have the same Christian name 

 and Hved at the time when surnames were coming into use. Interest 

 in family history was probably stimulated keenly by the introduction 

 of surnames. The old question of " What's in a name ? " is best 

 answered by showing how much greater trouble has been taken to 

 trace descent from father to son where there has been a fixed name 

 to transmit. 



Indeed, the power of the name has often oliliterated interest in 

 other lines of ancestry which are of equal importance from the point 

 of view of heredity. This effect has been intensified by the laws of 

 England controlling the inheritance of real property and of the right 

 to bear arms, with which the heralds, the official genealogists, were 

 primarily concerned. Hence it is that we find so often in early 

 pedigrees such courageous pictures as that shown in SHde No. 1, where 

 a single line is traced through no less than seven individuals, of whom 

 nothing is ventured beyond names of more than doubtful autlrenticity. 

 Somewhat similar treatment is seen in the earlier part of the heraldic 

 roll of the Lovell predigree kindly entrusted to me for the evening 

 l)y the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College. In the 

 later part of this roll, and in the finer and earlier roll, belonging to 



