Week 40: Oldest (ancestor)

Week 40's challenge is "Oldest."  I've looked at a few entries of other folks, oldest relative, oldest artifact, oldest newsclipping.  I think that my interest in oldest would be the oldest ancestor I can find, which I think would be on the Prewitt side so far.  

I have no idea of how much credence I can really put in a record that is over 600 years old.  But there is at least a remote possibility that I am descended from Sir Ralph de Neville, 4th Baron of Raby and 1st Earl of Westmoreland born in 1363, and his wife, Joan Plantagenet (illegitimate) de Beaufort, born in 1375.  Better genealogists than I will have to untangle this mess of half-siblings and illegitimate births to figure how it all fits together.  Actually, just looking at the Ancestry hints about these folks, it really requires an historian more than a genealogist.  It's fun to speculate that I might be descended from these people who played major roles in the history of England, and it is plausible insofar as there are records of that level of society that are definitely more complete than I'd find in the peasant classes (which is where I keep thinking we'd be found), but in the end I'm not sure it should matter to me.  17 generations (more or less) ago, is is a very long time ago.

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