If I have an ancestor going back to King william 1st?

Question:He may have been a squire or some thing similar with the right of a crest how do I go about finding about him.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: He may have been a squire or some thing similar with the right of a crest how do I go about finding about him.

You say "if I have an ancestor" the first rule of researching family history is prove your facts so you must work backwards from yourself filling in the gaps all the way. You need to check as far back as 1837 in the BMD registers and prove your theories and find your families on the census that are now available online. Then you need to start looking at Parish registers etc.

If he was a squire then he wouldn't have Royal blood he would have literally been a servant of the Royals, lesser people also had their own squires.
[DEFINITION OF SQUIRE FROM DICTIONARY;
Date: 13th century
1: a shield bearer or armor bearer of a knight
2 a: a male attendant especially on a great personage b: a man who devotedly attends a lady : gallant
3 a: a member of the British gentry ranking below a knight and above a gentleman b: an owner of a country estate; especially : the principal landowner in a village or district]

Only certain people held the right to have a Crest and therefore all people with the surname Bell won't have the same Crest.

If you can find out which stately home he lived or worked in then you may be able to find out if that house still has papers detailing who lived and worked there but a lot of these have gone or have been sent to the main Record Offices for that area.

Good luck with your search to me part of the "fun" is finding the answers to questions such as yours.

Just because Sir Matthew Pinsent can trace his ancestry back to God, it doesn't follow that you can!

Fro goodness sake you wont find him now he's been dead over 900 years even if you dig him up you won't recognise him

You need to trace your modern family first. And go BACKWARDS!

never seen that one but king william part 2 was good

King William I, also known as William Duke of Normandy II, also known as William the Conqueror, lived almost 1000 years ago. I am not sure they had coat-of-arms back then, but if they did, I doubt you could prove a paper trail of every generation going back 1000 years to show you have the rights to it. By the way, I like to call William the Conqueror "the world's grandfather". It seems that every person I ever trace roots of on www.rootsweb.com can be traced back to William the Conqueror. Even me. He is my 31st great-grandfather. Good luck trying to prove you have the rights to the coat-of-arms over the millions of other descendants he has.

If you can link into the old royal families of Europe before around the 14th century or so, then you might be able to find him. Otherwise, it's unlikely - but it certainly never hurts to try!

When you have researched your family back from now as far as you can, and a person appears that looks likely to be linked to royalty then try using this link.

http://www.royal.gov.uk/output/Page5.asp

You are unlikely to get this far back in your quest unless your ancestors were members of the nobility or royalty, or more likely, one of the many royal mistresses and bastard lines. (pardon my swearing, but that is the correct genealogical term for it!) Most peoples trees end abruptly in 1538 when parish records first begin, which means that you have another 400years of records to trawl through, usually written in Latin and of doubtful legibility. Not to mention of course that surnames were not fixed back then either - for the ordinaries amongst us, finding the lower classes is a nightmare, which is probably why everyone seems to be related to royalty in this period instead. Obviously, in the 11thC, nobody was poor!! Unless you have found an ancestor by then who is actually a duke or earl with land and ancestral home and they have a documented line in Burke's Peerage or somewhere going back into the 11th century and earlier, the chances of you finding someone alive in this period are almost negligable. Most people who claim to have William the Conqueror and Charlemagne in their trees are just having a laugh and are no better than the people who list Adam and Eve in their trees.

We all have ancestors going back to this time, even further...

The trouble is, we don't know who they were.
It's a bugger, isn't it?