The Post Quiz: Dodgy Ancestors? Answers
Created | Updated Feb 15, 2015
How many horse thieves are there on your family tree?
Dodgy Ancestors? Answers
Why didn't our ancestors think of us while they were alive? Maybe they wouldn't have embarrassed us so much.
Here are some answers for you. They're sort of non-definitive, though. People lie. A lot.
- How did William the Conqueror acquire his unpleasant nickname? His parents weren't married to each other.
- What was Elizabeth I's mother accused of? Witchcraft. (The jury's still out on that sixth finger.)
- What did Christopher Marlowe's father do for a living? He was a shoemaker.
- Daniel Defoe was a faker who claimed descent from the De Beau Faux family – his real name was Foe, and he wasn't an aristocrat. What was his father's profession? Tallow chandler.
- Talk about your inbreeding: James VI and I's parents were both great-grandchildren of what famous historical person? Henry VII Tudor. Shallow gene pool, but he inherited a lot of land.
- Winston Spencer Churchill is believed to have had an ancestor who worked for William the Conqueror. What was his job? Butler. (That's what Depenser means.)
- JRR Tolkien was of German ancestry. What did his family name originally mean? Foolhardy. (Unlike those CGI armies in LOTR, where even the cyberpixels wanted to run away.)
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Irish mother, Mary, claimed to trace her ancestry back to what famous family? Plantagenets. She inspired her son to become a writer, but hey, maybe they and James I were related?
- Speaking of Sherlock, what were Benedict Cumberbatch's ancestors doing on Barbados in the 18th Century? Running a sugar plantation with slave labour. Shame on them.
- What about Dr Watson? Martin Freeman has discovered that his great-grandparents' generation suffered from what disease? Syphilis. It caused blindness in children, too, a sad story.
How did you do? If there's one thing we learn from all this, it's that one's ancestors don't really determine one's own life. Just think what those famous British figures have done with what they were handed.
