Fist and Faith wrote:I'm assuming paths back to these huge historical figures are fairly well proven. I mean, I'm not going to try proving that Matilda is descended from Charlemagne, or Henry II from Matilda. That kind of thing.
Never heard of Clovis. I just googled. Very interesting! He doesn't seem to be Charlemagne's ancestor, though.
Tell that to the Saxon kings, and even the medieval kings. They managed to trace their ancestry back to Brutus, who was supposed to have founded "Britain", and even Adam and Eve!!
I hope you are checking all the sources used by these printed trees etc. that you are using (if I could have found a tongue in cheek emoticon I would have used it here). Seriously though, don't believe everything you read. I've found several errors in printed volumes. We have more information available to us now than the historians writing in the 19th century, even the 20th century, or at least the sources they didn't use are easier to get at now.
I would recommend a website called British History Online. Some of the stuff there is free, but some you have to pay for. The annual subscription is small compared to Ancestry and Find My Past. Both the latter sites now have lots of parish register images from different English counties, although their indexing of those registers leaves a lot to be desired. You need to be very imaginative about how the surnames you are looking for could be spelled, or mistranscribed. Even better, if a family history society has done a transcription, particularly on Find My Past, use that instead of the site's index. Also be very careful when using Family Search. Lots of the info on there is patron submitted, and there are many guesses and assumptions amongst the stuff transcribed from original records.