I attended an interesting lecture on a man named Edwin Butterworth. He died young, about 35, in a small village in Great Britain. I was not aware that the famous Baines historian hired local folks to gather information for his works. Baines was a non-conformist so he had difficulty gaining access to many of the English churches. He was a man of considerable means as he owned newspapers so he used his money to hire people to dig into the local records. One of those men was Edwin Butterworth. I absolutely love this quote he wrote in a letter to Peter Whittle, Editor of the Preston Chronicle published in 1836:
"The sons of this 'degenerate age' have I fear too little taste for the interesting details of Antiquarian publications. It is a well founded complaint that the majority of books now published are flimsy, slight and too imaginative. Works abounding in matters of fact useful knowledge and pure style are few. Utility is sacrificed to the rage of things for specious nothingness. This is an era of brief ostentation not of standard excellence - periods more brilliant in elaborate literature than the present have occurred in English history."
Umm, so I guess things haven't changed much since 1836?! If you are finding your family's eyes glaze over when use try to tell them about your awesome genealogical find - know that you aren't alone. Edwin felt the same way nearly 200 years ago.
I will be heading off on an adventure for the next two weeks so no blogs until I return. Happy Hunting!
While researching the dynastic connections for Volumes 3 & 4 of Echoes of Britannia, I kept having the same reaction over and over again: Wait… they were connected to where?
Britain was tying into Iberia. Then Italy. Then Hungary. Then Byzantium. Then Slavic territories far beyond anything that felt intuitively “British.”
I knew the Vikings went everywhere, that part wasn’t surprising. But what caught me off guard was just how deeply Saxons, Normans, Franks, Iberians, Italians, Hungarians, and Byzantine-linked elites were woven into Britain’s ruling families. These weren’t isolated marriages or rare diplomatic curiosities. They were part of a broad, sustained network.
Which raises the obvious question modern minds struggle with:
How did this actually work? No phones. No email. Limited literacy. Slow travel. Dozens of spoken languages.
And yet, it worked.
Genealogy, once again, forced me to rethink my assumptions.
There Was No Single Spoken Language But There Was a System!
The medieval world did not rely on one universal spoken language. What it relied on instead was a layered communication system, where different languages served different purposes.
At the center of that system was Latin.
From roughly the ninth century through the late Middle Ages, Latin functioned as the administrative glue of Europe. It was the language of:
diplomacy
treaties
royal charters
marriage contracts
ecclesiastical records
legal proceedings
If something mattered across borders, it was written in Latin.
That doesn’t mean kings and queens sat around conversing fluently in Latin over dinner. It means their administrations could communicate seamlessly even when rulers themselves spoke different vernaculars.
This is an important distinction genealogy makes visible: rulers did not need to be literate if their systems were.
2. The Clergy Were the Communication Network
In a world without technology, communication was human and the most mobile, educated humans were clergy.
Priests, monks, bishops, and notaries:
were trained in Latin
moved between courts, monasteries, and dioceses
served as scribes, translators, advisors, and diplomats
maintained correspondence across thousands of miles
A bishop in England could correspond with a monastery in Italy or a royal court near Hungary with little difficulty because they shared the same educational foundation.
This clerical network is one of the most underestimated forces in medieval connectivity. It never truly collapsed, even in times of political chaos. Genealogy doesn’t always spotlight it because clergy leave fewer descendants but their documentary footprints are everywhere.
3. Vernacular Languages Were Not the Barrier We Imagine
Another modern assumption genealogy dismantles is the idea that language differences must have made communication nearly impossible.
In reality, elite multilingualism was normal.
Consider:
Norman rulers spoke Old French, governed English speakers, and relied on Latin documentation
Scandinavian elites blended Old Norse and Old English
Iberian courts operated in early Romance languages alongside Latin and often Arabic or Hebrew
Byzantine elites used Greek internally but communicated externally through Latin-trained intermediaries
Royal and noble children were frequently raised multilingual. They were fostered in foreign courts, educated by clerics, and married into households where new languages were learned as a matter of survival.
When a British noblewoman married into Castile or Lombardy, she didn’t arrive linguistically isolated. She arrived with tutors, chaplains, ladies-in-waiting, and clerks who maintained continuity while adaptation occurred.
4. Marriage Was a Communication Technology
Genealogy makes one thing clear over and over again: marriage carried infrastructure with it.
A dynastic marriage wasn’t just a bride and groom. It was:
an entourage
translators
administrators
cultural intermediaries
Courts didn’t become multilingual accidentally. Marriage imported language, customs, and political intelligence.
This is one reason Britain’s links to Iberia, Italy, and the Slavic world feel so sudden when viewed casually but look entirely logical when traced through families. Every marriage was also a conduit.
5, Trade Routes Were Information Routes
It’s impossible to separate genealogy from geography and this is where the Vikings stop being the “exception” and start being the illustration.
Trade routes across:
the North Sea
the Baltic
the Mediterranean
major river systems like the Rhine and Danube
moved more than goods. They moved ideas, norms, stories, political knowledge, and people.
England wasn’t at the edge of Europe. It was part of a maritime and river-based world that connected Britain to Byzantium more reliably than many inland regions.
By the time dynasties intermarried, the world they were entering was already familiar.
Byzantium Only Feels Distant Because We Were Taught It Was
For modern audiences, Byzantine connections often feel the most shocking. That’s largely because our historical narratives split “East” and “West” far earlier than medieval reality did.
In the medieval mind, Byzantium was:
Christian
imperial
diplomatically engaged
genealogically relevant
Byzantine elites used Greek internally and Latin externally. They intermarried with Slavic, Hungarian, and Western ruling houses. These connections didn’t feel exotic at the time, they feel exotic now because modern history textbooks simplified them away.
So Was There a Common Language?
Functionally, yes — Latin.
Practically, it depended on context.
Administration and law: Latin Religion: Latin in the West, Greek in the East Court life: local vernaculars and French Diplomacy: Latin Daily life: regional languages
This layered system worked because everyone understood its rules.
6. Why This Matters for Echoes of Britannia
Volumes 3 & 4 of my book didn’t uncover anomalies. It uncovered how Europe functioned.
Britain was not shaped in isolation. It was shaped through:
marriage networks
clerical communication
trade routes
multilingual courts
What feels astonishing now is only astonishing because modern narratives falsely emphasize fragmentation. Medieval Europe was plural but integrated.
7. The Larger Genealogical Lesson
Technology didn’t create connectivity. People did.
Systems built on education, mobility, and shared administrative languages connected continents long before cables and satellites existed.
Genealogy reminds us of this quietly and persistently. Every marriage record, charter, and dynastic link tells the same story: the medieval world was more interconnected and more functional than we were taught to believe.
I’ll be heading to Salt Lake City for RootsTech, and if you’re attending in person, I’d truly love to connect. I’ll be presenting Voices That Vanish; Capturing Family Stories That Matter on 5 March at 9:30 AM in Room 155 EF, and you’re warmly invited to join me.
I also have a second session, What They Didn’t Write Down, available as a pre-recorded presentation available on 3/4 at 9:00 AM Mountain Time; please be sure to check that out as well.
Looking ahead, I’m becoming more intentional about meeting readers and fellow genealogists face-to-face, whether I’m presenting or simply attending. Conferences are as much about conversation as they are about lectures, and I hope this is the beginning of more informal, meaningful connections. If you see me at RootsTech, please say hello, I’d love that.
Oh, technology. You love it when it works and you despise it when it fails.
I recently had a failure that stopped me cold, even though I was absolutely certain I had done everything right. I’m sharing what happened so you can avoid making the same mistake.
My number one rule has always been to back up. And I do. Religiously. But sometimes, even that isn’t enough.
I was working on Volume 5 of Echoes of Britannia when I realized it had grown too large and really needed to be split. I saved Volume 5, made a copy on my desktop, and renamed that copy Volume 6. Then I opened Volume 5, deleted the material that would live in Volume 6, saved, and closed it. Next, I opened Volume 6, deleted the material that belonged in Volume 5, saved, and closed that file as well.
That evening, I saved both files to Dropbox and to a standalone external hard drive.
All seemed right with the world. Sure.
Three weeks later, while working on Volume 8, I became confused about a pedigree and reopened Volume 6 to double-check a spouse. That’s when I noticed something was wrong. The footnote I was looking for was gone. In fact, nearly three-quarters of the footnotes in Volume 6 were missing.
I refused to panic. Surely it was just the way Word had loaded the document. I closed it without saving and reopened it.
Nope. Still gone.
No worries, I told myself. I’ll just open the Dropbox version.
The footnotes were gone there, too.
That actually made sense, every night I saved over the same files. But Dropbox keeps deleted versions for thirty days, right? Except…there was nothing to restore. Why? Because I hadn’t deleted the file. I had saved over it using the same filename. The old version was overwritten, not archived.
At this point, panic started to creep in but I reminded myself I also saved everything to a standalone hard drive. Surely that would save me.
It didn’t.
About a week and a half earlier, I had uploaded the entire folder to the drive, overwriting those files as well.
Now I was panicking and I knew I wasn’t thinking clearly. So I did the sensible thing: I turned to Geni, my trusty ChatGPT research assistant.
After I explained the situation, he calmly told me the truth: there was no way to recover what was lost.
Then, cheerfully, he added that it wasn’t so bad. I’d written it once, so I could write it again.
OMG. No. That was the last thing I wanted to hear.
Let’s just say you were lucky you weren’t at my house at that moment. I railed against the universe. How dare this happen when I had been so careful, so diligent, so responsible?
And then, right in the middle of that fury, it hit me.
Geni might have the footnotes.
Here’s something I didn’t fully appreciate until that moment: he did. Almost all of them.
As I wrote these volumes, I frequently turned to Geni with a skeleton narrative and uploaded my research finds. My prompt was always the same: “Write a short, tight, engaging narrative with Chicago-style footnotes from the information I provide, with no subheadings or conclusions.”
Using the chat search feature, I was able to locate most of those narratives. Rebuilding the footnotes wasn’t instant but it was possible. It took three full days to reattach everything, but that was infinitely better than starting from scratch.
Eight narratives were missing footnotes. Geni explained that saved chats can sometimes be lost during system upgrades, which may account for those gaps. He also gently pointed out something else I shouldn’t be doing: I tend to write very long chats. The longer the chat, the more likely parts of it may become difficult to retrieve later.
Lesson learned.
I now know that when I save files to Dropbox or to an external drive, I must rename them every time so they don’t overwrite earlier versions. Backups only work if the history survives.
AI has been a wonderful partner in my genealogy work over the past two years, but it never occurred to me that it might become the one place where my work still existed when everything else failed.
Registration
opened for the 2026 Palatines to America National Conference, to be
held in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, June 19, 2026. Early registration discount is
available until April 15. The conference has activities and tours planned in
addition to many presentations by genealogy experts on subjects related to
German migration, military service, occupations, Revolutionary War experience,
Amish and Mennonite research, and more. I’ll be presenting two talks –
Palatinate Pathways: From One Homeland
to Many American Homes and From Soldiering to Civil Life. See full details
at https://www.pennpalam.org/cpage.php?pt=19
One of the unexpected gifts of long-term genealogical research is that, over time, patterns begin to emerge that have very little to do with dates, titles, or coats of arms and everything to do with human behavior.
I noticed one of those patterns recently while working on my latest books, Echoes of Britannia and Roots in the Rhineland. With the help of Geni, my AI research assistant, I found myself asking a deceptively simple question: Why wasn’t the House of Leiningen showing up where I expected it to?
The Leiningens were powerful. They ruled for centuries in the Rhineland. They were well-established, well-documented, and, as anyone who has worked with their records knows, deeply entrenched in their regional authority. I had researched them extensively for Roots in the Rhineland, and their historical footprint is undeniable. Queen Victoria herself was a descendant through the Leiningen line.
So why, as I worked through the dense, interconnected dynastic webs of Echoes of Britannia, did they largely fail to appear?
At first glance, it felt like a contradiction. Powerful families tend to turn up everywhere in medieval and early modern genealogy. They marry into other ruling houses. Their daughters become conduits of influence. Their descendants sit at the crossroads of multiple dynasties. That’s how the familiar “game changers” of Europe, certain Norman, French, German, and British houses came to shape the continent. Their power wasn’t just territorial. It was relational.
The Leiningens were different.
What emerged, as I stepped back and examined the pattern rather than the pedigree, was a quiet but telling truth: power alone doesn’t guarantee connection. And connection, not longevity, is what determines whether a family becomes part of the larger historical network.
The House of Leiningen, for all its strength, was comparatively insular. They intermarried narrowly, largely within a familiar circle of similarly placed families. They prized internal continuity over outward alliance. They produced many sons and comparatively few daughters who married “out.” When their influence appears clearly on the broader European stage, it is remarkably late, through Queen Victoria in the nineteenth century, pulling them forward into modern royalty rather than embedding them deeply in the medieval dynastic webs that underpin so much of European history.
Their absence from those networks isn’t a failure of research. It’s evidence of a choice.
As I worked through this realization, another contrast became apparent. Other houses, some equally old, some initially just as regional, eventually made different decisions. They leaned less on purity of line and more on adaptability. They allowed daughters to become bridges. They accepted change when political and social realities shifted. In doing so, they became connectors rather than enclaves.
One phrase summed it up perfectly: they leaned into adaptability over purity.
That sentence stopped me in my tracks, because it didn’t just explain a genealogical pattern. It explained something much larger.
In genealogy, families that cling too tightly to the known and the comfortable don’t necessarily disappear. They continue. They endure. But they fade in influence. They slowly detach from the currents shaping the wider world. Their names persist, but their relevance narrows.
And the more I thought about it, the harder it was not to see the parallel in our own time.
We are living in an era where many institutions, organizations, and even families are doing precisely what the Leiningens once did: clinging to familiar structures because they feel safe, even when those structures no longer work. Change is framed as threat. Adaptation is mistaken for abandonment. Preservation of identity becomes resistance to growth.
The irony that genealogy keeps teaching me is that adaptation isn’t the enemy of continuity. It’s the reason continuity survives.
The most interconnected families in Echoes of Britannia didn’t become influential because they were the purest or the most rigid. They became influential because they were willing to form alliances, reconsider strategies, and respond to changing realities. They didn’t abandon who they were but they acknowledged the world around them.
The families that refused to adapt often believed they were protecting themselves. In reality, they were limiting their future options.
Stagnation in genealogy doesn’t look like failure. It looks like stability. It’s quiet. Respectable. Sometimes even admired. But over time, the effect is unmistakable: fewer connections, fewer points of influence, fewer reasons for others to engage.
That insight has been surprisingly personal. In my own family line, the Leiningen branch eventually produced one son… whose son produced one daughter … me. Historically speaking, that was considered an ending. Even today, I see lingering attitudes among distant relatives that quietly reinforce the same old hierarchies of value. The prejudice against women isn’t a modern invention. It’s the echo of centuries-old decisions.
Genealogy has a way of making these things visible, whether we want to see them or not.
And that’s the real lesson I keep coming back to: Genealogy isn’t just about where we came from. It’s about how systems behave over time. Families, like societies, don’t stagnate because they lack strength. They stagnate because they confuse familiarity with sustainability.
The houses that dominate European history didn’t do so by staying comfortable. They did so by understanding that connection, across regions, ideas, and people, is what allows anything to grow.
Perhaps that’s why genealogy feels so unexpectedly relevant right now. It reminds us that survival is not the same as progress, longevity is not the same as influence, and purity of lineage or of thought, rarely prepares anyone for a changing world.
Sometimes the most valuable historical lesson isn’t about who ruled, but who adapted.
And genealogy, if we let it, is very good at telling us which was which.
I’m pleased to share that I’ll be presenting a workshop at the National Genealogical Society Conference: WS01 Starting Smart with AI: Hands-On Tools for Family Historians, and I’d love for you to join me.
This session is designed to be practical and immediately useful, focusing on real examples, hands-on tools, and strategies that help family historians integrate AI thoughtfully into their research and workflow. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to refine how you use these tools, you’ll leave with ideas you can put into practice right away.
If you’re interested in attending, you can register using my personal referral link and code below:
I hope to see some familiar faces in Fort Wayne, Indiana on 26 May, 9:00 AM–12:00 PM. Feel free to share this with colleagues or anyone interested in genealogy, research methodology, or practical AI applications.
