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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.
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