There is good reason to think that one of my ancestors is mentioned in the Domesday Book. Just in case some of you do not know what the Domesday book is, it was a census taken of the British Isles starting in 1086, right after the Norman Conquest. William of Normandy, from then on known as William I or William The Conqueror, thought it might be nice to know what he now owned. He was an acquisitive kind of guy. He sent his men all over England to each and every shire (yes, they really called them that – Tolkien did not make the word up) to find out what and how much each landholder had in land, livestock, and peasants. And women, of course. Then William could tax these assets and get even more rich and powerful.
Now my ancestor wasn’t William, or one of his nobles, or even one of his tax collector guys. Nothing quite so grand. My ancestor was a pig farmer living in the fens of eastern England, in a hamlet southeast of York. His name was Johnson and the line about him in the Domesday book tells how many acres he had to keep his pigs, how many pigs he had, how many wives (one), and how many sons. (Either he had no daughters or daughters weren’t important enough to mention.)
Today my third cousin-once removed, whose last name is Johnson, owns the same bit of land his (and my) ancestor owned and paid taxes on. It is still a pig farm. It’s been a pig farm for nearly one thousand years.
A thousand years of pigs, think of it. A thousand years of Johnsons. My name has never been Johnson, but my great-great-grandfather in my maternal line was named Johnson, and although he didn’t do the dirty pig-farming work himself, he owned the land and paid the men who mucked and slopped those pigs.
And if it hadn’t been for a greedy, too-powerful man named William, I would never know how far back my pig-farming heritage goes. So if my grandson becomes a pig farmer someday, we will know where it comes from, won’t we?
How far back can you trace your ancestors? If you’d care to share a story about this topic, please leave a comment here. At the end of each month I’ll gather up the Sharing History comments and pick one at random from a drawing, and send the winner of the drawing my e-book: your choice of a Making History Workbook.
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