Customer Reviews

Royalty for Commoners The Complete Known Lineage of John of Gaunt, Son of

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In my title I almost said "remarkably bad genealogical scholarship," but anyone familiar with the previous editions of this book will recognise that it would be inaccurate to associate the word "scholarship" with this book.

All of the serious flaws present in the earlier editions remain in this book: rampant spelling and transcription errors, erroneous and misleading bibliographical entries, and the presentation of purely conjectural genealogical theories as though they were a part of "the complete known ancestry of John of Gaunt."

These kinds of embarassing errors are found repeatedly on every single page of this book.

Due to the great amount of inaccuracy and genealogical nonsense, anyone seriously interested in royal medieval genealogy would do well to steer clear of this book.

No genealogical researcher should touch this book. All editions have been riddled with errors, and the latest is no exception. The spellings are frequently wrong, the lines are often inaccurate, mythical lines are not distinguished from historical ones, highly conjectural lines are not distinguished from proven ones, and most of the books and articles associated with many of the lines are completely unrelated to the material they allegedly cover. No statement in the book can be trusted at face value. Even if you want to use it just as a finding aid, double check everything.

Chris Bennett

This book has reasonably valid information in it (checked against more reliable sources), but the author makes no attempt to differentiate the reliable from the unreliable, and far too much of it is unreliable. I suspect the author doesn't even keep his database in a computer genealogical program because there are many internal inconsistencies (I'm my own grandpa kinds of inconsistencies) that all the respectable genealogical software would catch.

This book must be avoided! It is full of mistakes, some big mistakes that could let you dream about some ancestors who are not in fact.
Biggest errors are for example Makhir/Theuderic and Zaida cases.

The bibliography is bad, it looks like he added works he never saw!

Don't waste your money with this book! This is bad genealogy and you cannot be sure of anything from this book.

This book is a great bargain for anyone interested in early and middle medieval history and genealogy. Accumulating this data by acquiring other books would cost at least 10 times as much. A caution: legendary, mythical and even fictional lineages are mixed in with the historical lineages, so care should be taken when using the book. Applicable references are given with most of the lineages, so the list of references can be checked for the known scholarly sources (Schwennicke etc), especially on anything before AD 1000. There are also silly errors (I'm my own grandpa type stuff), but most can be spotted by careful reading.

The publishing history of this book has almost a soap opera flavor. The 1st Edition was excoriated by specialist reviewers and ordinary readers alike, which brought mea culpas from the author. My own judgment (in a published review) was: "Information provided on relationships seems semi-trustworthy -- until you come across a linkage you *know* is wrong, and then you begin to wonder about the others. Stuart's sloppiest point is dates, about which he seems to have a casual disregard. Use this with great caution, and only as a starting point."

The 2d Edition was a complete do-over, and was rather more successful, but the specialists, having been burned once, were reluctant to approve Stuart's revised methods. In its Preface, Stuart commented that he corresponded with about fifty "generally supportive" readers and that "their concerns have been noted and incorporated into the fabric of the Second Edition. . . ." Moreover, "rather than try to revise the imperfect First Edition," he went back to his original manuscript and started over, spending three summers in Salt Lake City studying the IGI and analyzing discrepancies. Readers familiar with Weis will recognize the format, but Stuart follows the possibly unsettling practice of numbering generations back into the past (the opposite of Weis). Weis also includes about 300 ancestors of John of Gaunt, compared to about 5,000 entries in Stuart. And where Moriarty's _Plantagenet Ancestry_ compiles the forebears of Edward III, Stuart begins one crucial generation later, allowing the inclusion of many more minor French, German, and Balkan lines.

This edition, again, is described as "a nearly complete re-write." Did he get it right this time? He makes no bones about this being a synthesis from secondary sources, the additional sixty-odd pages being the result of perusing the new literature since the last edition. And certain older sources of poor reputation have been dropped, too. Stuart doesn't provide a list of these, but a comparison of the bibliography -- now comprising about 860 "Sources" rather than 650 "Authorities" -- between this and the previous edition will tell you what they are. However, I'm aware of the extreme rarity of some of the titles he lists -- I've been looking for them for years myself -- so I have to wonder if he has actually read all of them. Especially those in 18th century French, Germany, and Italian. In addition to the general index of persons, there is now also an index of titles (usually geographic), which is an excellent idea. Some lines have been dropped altogether since the previous edition, but there still are some iffy lineages: Charlemagne is given a descent from Clovis the Riparian, which is highly questionable, having been invented long ago for political reasons. (One can't legitimately go back farther than Charles's great-great-grandfather, St. Arnulf, before running out of good sources.) But the purported lineages that will (and should) raise eyebrows are those taken from the Bible, especially Genesis and Chronicles. For example, William III Taillefer, Count of Toulouse, is given a direct, sixty-generation descent from Abraham, which is ludicrous. Another claimed ancestor of Edward III is Darius the Great, King of Persia in the early 5th century B.C. Another is Emperor Tiberius II in the 6th century, which depends on Settipani's _Ancestors from Antiquity_ -- itself a body of work guaranteed to start loud arguments. At least Stuart doesn't include Adam and Eve.

The best thing I can say is that, if one sticks to those lines for which the research on which they are based is known to be reliable -- and you can tell which lines those are by reading the annotations in this bibliography -- then this might be a useful adjunct to Weis and similar compilations. Just ignore those lineages which seem too good to be true, because they almost certainly are.

You've got to give booksellers some credit for audacity: with prices ranging from $60.00 to $179.00 for this... well, it's not genealogy, at least not genealogy as most people understand it. THERE ARE NO PROVEN DESCENTS FROM ANTIQUITY! That means much of this book is fantasy.

Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc. of Baltimore owes the genealogical community an apology for publishing this rubbish. And now they've issued a paperback edition. Apparently, the editorial board at GPC doesn't understand or care that people take this garbage seriously, and it's not right to take advantage of them. Is the money they make off this book that important?

I also own this book and use it extensively, not quite as useful to me as Turton's Plantagenet Ancestry or G. Andrews Moriarity, if you can find it, but what could be. I always research a line several times before accepting it, as one must do if building an accurate family tree. I did not find it "riddled with errors" although my second edition had a number of typos,problems etc. It is easy to sit back and trash someone else's life work, it seems. Many of the very obscure, ancient lines included will probably never be fully verified and remain speculative. One thing I did find maddening however, was the the index, which listed everyone by their FIRST NAME, especially difficult in an age when there were about 13 personal names for nearly everybody. I would recommend the latest editions as a helpful tool, along with the other resources mentioned above.

This book is an excellent resource for those claiming a descent from John of Gaunt. It presents the most extensive ancestry for John of Gaunt published to date and is accompanied by exhaustive sources for each ancestral line.