AIBU to ask what people mean by calling themselves an old family?

I would suspect that someone really of an "old family" would think boasting about it to be very vulgar and not worthy of them, like boasting about having money. In my experience it has always been other people who boasted about them, not the people themselves General de Burgh spoke of his ancestry as his ancestry and because it was part of a conversation, not as "I'm from an old family, you know".

(They were not rich. They ran their home as a large B&B, in effect. I think there were two women who came in from the local village and helped with all the rooms and cooking and cleaning and the rest of it, but the family worked pretty hard at it.)

I think of it as a snobby term for 'rich and privileged'. We all have ancestors going back the same amount of time, but most of us peasants can't trace our family back very far, too busy working for the privileged. It's nonsensical really and I would despise anyone who actually said those words as being a twat.

@YerMotherWasAHamster and @HoppityBun

Yes lol

We have all been on this earth for exactly same amount of time .
’old families’ can trace their lineage back via records ( or so they say ) due to their privilege at the time - but the line is no older than anyone’s else’s.
The concept of ‘old families’ , like the concept of ‘royalty’ is a lie and a social construct designed to entrench privilege .

PS I was delighted to see that the government has removed the last of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords . Now change the name from HOL to something more appropriate please

I've heard it far more in Europe and the UK than in the US.

I have always understood it to mean a family that can trace its lineage back many centuries.

Never considered the term offensive. Merely a statement of fact.

It is code for “my family is better connected to the upper classes / wealthier/ posher in some way better than yours”. Usually said to make someone else feel bad.

This makes sense to me. The kinds of families that have oil portraits of GGGGfather on the wall, silently judging them for the disrepair of the Manor 🤣 I love tracing my history but it's hard because I come from a long line of poor people and records are scarce.

@FunnyOrca

many older records are just baptisms, marriages and funerals in churches and not digitised in any way, if the church burned down they would be lost. That said our records are stored at the county records deposit. My own family tree on one branch was to stuttgart and the records were bombed during ww2 so can’t trace further back

I’ve never heard anyone say this in the uk but was common in the USA, one of the areas oldest families completely forgetting the native Americans who had lived there for circa 20k years. Those of us with aristocratic heritage struggle to trace much beyond 1800, my brother has tried but trace disappears

Yes, I appreciate that the term must be extremely offensive in the US context, but that is where I have heard it most.

I am unfamiliar with the part of your comment about a fire in a church? Can you explain? Americans claiming Scottish/Irish ancestry fascinate me.

Old family means nobility. The previous owners of our house were from an old German noble family which can be traced back to the 12th century. Our notaire treated them like royalty and us like peasants, despite the fact that we were the ones paying his bill!

Ireland’s Guinness family for example.

There’s even a TV series on them now.

If they say it of themselves they are a tosspot. If someone else says it of them, they can't exactly be blamed for that.

I have never heard anyone claim it for themselves, only other people saying it about someone. And I bet whoever it was would be embarrassed if they heard it said of them.

Incidentally, the Mountbatten-Windsors are not that old a family. Their ancestry got very mixed when all that wars of the roses stuff was going on.

Depends on how they say it but it usually means they're a tosspot.

I'm first nation background and it tends to piss us off tbh. They do shut up about being from the Balkans, all you hear is Irish/Scottish/English etc.
In the case of Scottish backgrounds, all it took was a fire in the Church and all records were gone. It is a load of meaningless rubbish.

If that was Uncle Andrew in the Magician's nephew, or his sister, which is who it sounds like to me, they were awful people and total snobs but that doesn't mean everyone who knows who their great great grandfather was and where he lived is awful or a snob.

You might also find it, I think, in Georgette Heyer, in which people, usually bored female ones, know all about how everyone in the area they come from is related to everyone else and might talk about "comes from an old Somerset family" or something of the kind. Is it in Austen? I wouldn't be surprised if it were said of Mr Darcy.

Chris de Burgh's grandfather (when they were running their castle as a hotel) mentioned to my mother that they could trace their family back to them first moving to Ireland, and before that to the Norman Conquest, and before that more-or-less to a particular village in Scandinavia.

"But there was a bit of wrong side of the blanketry at about the time of Rollo," he said a bit sadly. This apparently spoiled everything.

He was the last de Burgh of a direct line father to son: he had only a daughter, whose husband used her surname and passed it on to his sons if they wanted it. Still, from the ninth century to the twentieth is quite of an age. But I have always wondered if it was actually true: was he really the sort of person who traced ancestry like that? Or did he have a maiden aunt who had done it out of sheer boredom?

Old families=money/wealth=better records/easier to do a family tree. I'm working on the family tree but when they couldn't read and write and dug ditches for a living, records are scarce. Would quite like to find some massive inheritance but it looks unlikely!

My ancestry goes back to an amoeba. The amoeba, in fact.

That’s really interesting. I don’t think any of the men who married in would have taken the name (they are all the last in their name) <not that any of us care for clarity but it’s fun to imagine> so I guess that would leave adopting a grandchild or cousin- I wonder who my dad would have picked 😂

It only became mandatory for all parishes to record all births, marriages and deaths in the reign of Henry VIII. And quite often the parish records from that far back don't survive. It's usually only people from aristocratic families who can trace the family tree back further than the c16, because they did their own genealogies; illiterate peasants didn't. It's uncommon for those who aren't from an upper-crust background to be able to get any further back than about 1600, usually - depends how lucky you are in the survival of parish records and other family documents, legal documents etc. I've got a relative who's into family history and she's traced one line (the wealthiest one - they were quite big landowners and businesspeople in their area, and also had a rare name, which helps) back to the 1590s, but after that it's a dead end. All the other branches, she can't get any info pre about 1680.

Good replies on this thread, I should say. I think what the term gets at, at least in Britain, is that there’s a difference between ‘family’ as in your relatives (which obviously we all have), and ‘family’ as an organisation which has property, titles and traditions of its own and different from other ‘families’.

Most of us have the latter, but to a fairly small extent—the surname, jewellery passed down, half-remembered stories of a hereditary trade—and those fade away or get absorbed into others in a generation or two. But an ‘old family’ can trace its own back for centuries; and is also the organisation which absorbs others.

The royal family is the best example obviously. Even though the Normans, the Stuarts, the Tudors and so on will have millions of descendants by now, we think of those traditions as all belonging to the modern Windsors.

It’s used by people who know they wouldn’t survive in the real world as they don’t have the resilience or brains.

Because of this they use the last thing available to them “oh my great great great grandad was <insert name of someone who got rich or famous off the back of someone else’s misery”, you must suck up to me.

I’ve seen this play out so many times working in London and living down south. They’re about as useful as a chocolate teapot and have the brains of an amoeba, but their name opens doors. When the company realise they are a liability in the law firm or investment bank their name got them into, they’re shipped off to Hong Kong/Singspore/Dubai to work because they can’t be fired because their dad went to boarding school and is mates with someone high up.

Seen it loads and been involved in many hires and transfers of them.

It’s outdated, but it still exists in our society.

They would also adopt a child from close family and change his name or marry a daughter to someone who was willing to take her name. One of Jane Austen's brothers was adopted in this way and it made a huge difference for all the family financially.

I am a professional genealogist and have only ever heard this term used by Americans from the US who mean "some of my ancestors were here before the revolutionary war in 1776". In a UK context I would take it to mean a family with deep roots in the same part of the country - my paternal line was in the same part of the world for as far back as anyone can trace but weren't in any way aristocratic.