The Ancestors of Vincent Albert Grana: Volume 2

This work, in three volumes, takes the documented ancestry of Vincent Albert Grana to all his American ancestors that have been traced to European nobility and royalty. Suddenly, medieval history comes alive with those who made it. These volumes contain thousands of footnotes and references. The references that are used are the same as those used by hereditary societies to track the ancestry of their applicants. If I cannot footnote a person, they are not in this book. These are listed in the bibliography at the end of each volume. The numbering system is called the Ahnentafel numbering system. Everyone on a pedigree chart. The person whose pedigree it is will be number 1. The parents will be No. 2 and 3. The four grandparents will be 4, 5, 6, and 7. In the fourth generation, the great-grandparents will be numbers 8 through 15. So, my father is 2, my mother is 3, my paternal grandfather is 4, and my maternal grandfather is six. To find anyone’s father, just multiply their number by 2. To find anyone’s mother, multiply their number by 2 and add one. Men are always even numbers. Women are always odd numbers. When a parent of a person is unknown, that number is skipped. Therefore, it is possible to trace lineage from number 1 as far back as it goes. Or one can start in the distant past and bring the numbers forward to the present. My database program is called Roots Magic. It generates these Ancestor Numbers automatically. However, it only generates up to 30 generations. After that, in the 31st generation, it generates random numbers, even negative ones. 231 is over two billion. As you can see the numbers get astronomically huge. COATS OF ARMS: Where possible, I have shown the historical Coats of Arms associated with that person. Daughters typically have the same Coat of Arms as their father. Some notable exceptions are queens, as they typically carried both the Coat of Arms of their father and their husband in pale, or on the same shield, split vertically. Heraldry can tell the story of a lineage all its own. In some cases, the pedigree goes back before the age of heraldry. For example, it is doubtful that Charlemagne carried the shield shown beside his name. It is, however, the Coat of Arms that has been attributed to him. In other cases, such as the early Viking ancestry of some of the ancestors in this book, I have attributed a Coat of Arms to bring attention to the line. The coat of arms began to be used as a hereditary device in England in the mid-twelfth century. Although, presumably, it initially arose as a means of identification on the battlefield, as time went on it evolved into - literally - a status symbol. As a rule of thumb, in later medieval times it was the 'manor-holding' classes who bore arms.[1] Of course, it is the hereditary aspect of arms that makes them useful to the genealogist. Each coat of arms belongs to a family - not, as some modern 'commercial heralds' would have us believe, to a surname - and no two families can bear the same arms. This means that a coat of arms, for example on a funeral monument or a seal, should in principle identify the associated family unambiguously. The arms passed to younger sons as well as the eldest, though they were often altered (or differenced) in some way to indicate this - eventually an elaborate system of marks of cadency was developed to indicate the arms of younger sons (and also those of the eldest son during his father's lifetime).