Royal Ancestry
I have drawn (rather sketchily) the above lineages showing how I connect through my ancestors, in diverging and re-converging routes, to the royal King James V of Scotland, through sons of two of his noble mistresses Euphine Elphinstone and Elizabeth Carmichael. These families of royal descent, remaining in the Orkney's and the Shetland Islands, kept long association and intermarried, inbreeding as one may say. Although dismissable as the offspring of illegitimates, they had their own sense of importance and had much influence in the islands, up until royal memories had become but distant and their ways of life no longer one of privilege.
Most people are likely descended from royalty, but the availability of records to practically track this are not there for all, most ancestors not being in any records beyond the 1700's, unless they are aristocrats. Its fortunate that the records of my own Shetland family were well kept. The Scottish nobles with their revealing names such as Stewart and Sinclair, in time mixed with old Viking families, such as the Inkster's (my mothers maiden name). It is even said that there are very few people of the Shetland Islands who are not descended from royalty.
The closest of my royals, James V, was grandson to the Tudor English King Henry VII, and therefore a nephew to the infamously most famous royal of all, Henry VIII. Of James's character, we see a noble personality who had a fondness for music, playing the lute and singing with a husky voice, his liking to collect exotic animals, and habit to, from time to time, throw off his royal persona and entourage, to go freely here and there disguised as an ordinary fellow called the Good Man of Ballengeich. Not at all boring then, for attracting those fair ladies who early on became his mistresses. He was handsome, red haired, rich and royal. As it had been poetically written of him 'sweetness and strength illuminate his face as if he were the child of Venus and Mars'.
In the part of France where I now live, in Occitanie, there is much interest in the Holy Bloodline, from a presumed alliance between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, a lineage carried forth by the Merovingians and in time into the Sinclairs and Stewarts. If there was any proof to such a theory, which there is not, it could therefore be said I and my family also descend from Mary Magdalene and the holy Jesus himself. Really, any link I can be more sure of having to the old Levant would be through my rare matriarchal DNA which is indeed traced back to the Middle East, Anatolia, Armenia and the Caucasus mountains.
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