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

It's a nonsense term used by people who think they are better than you.

i have never heard the expression
unless
old farming family, perhaps

I’m surprised this is being attributed to Americans since European aristocracy boast about their ancient families. The Grimaldis can trace back to the 11th century and the Borommeans roughly the same. It seems especially important since many of the European titles are now largely defunct.

On asking online it's the same thing really . Here's the definition :

The terms "old family" and "old money" are often used interchangeably, but they have distinct meanings:

• Old Family: Refers to families that have been wealthy for several generations, typically over a century or more. These families often have a long history of wealth and have maintained their financial status through inheritance and successful businesses.
• 2
• Old Money: Specifically refers to families with inherited wealth that has been passed down through generations, often associated with a sense of aristocracy and privilege. It contrasts with "new money," which represents wealth acquired more .

Yes, obviously.

The way in which society has been structured means the ancestors of Jane Bloggs are the ones who did all the labour, quite possibly had their share of the commons nicked too and who weren't considered important enough to record. It is a reflection of what happened.

Though actually, probably just as common in the UK is that Jane Bloggs' ancestors had no choice but to rock up to one of our stinking, dangerous, Industrial Revolution cities at some point in the 19th century and at that point lost touch with the land where they'd been subsistence farming. We were the earliest society in the world to proletarianise.

Distemper, incontinence, discovering the family heirlooms are rhinestone, Woolworths circa 1925, crumbling foundation dusted liberally with face power, lead poisoning, out houses, pock marks, spam, primogeniture, primark, Downton Abbey wood Estate, Sarf London... subletting attics to long lost crazy relatives, gravy legs, rabies.

Isn't the phrase ' old money ' and not old family ?
Everyone can lay claim to be in a family for many generations , that's humankind .
But the phrase old money means your family has been rich for many generations and you pass on that status to the next generation ( and usually the big family home , portraits and a house of antiques )

Posh, monied, self-important, possibly signs of in-breeding. Delapidated interiors to crumbling houses, as Great Uncle Toby lost it all in a bad investment. That kind of thing?

Never heard it before. Probably a House of Lords thing

Yes, this is right. Also, the way family trees get so intertwined means that within a surprisingly short period of time we are all literally descended from the same people (I believe every European is descended from every European alive around a thousand years ago; it will be even shorter the more local you get). It’s why tv ancestry shows so often turn up royals and so forth.

So the ‘old family’ thing is really about carrying on the specific name, property and traditions of an identifiable family from way back, more than genetics. Because the chances are that, genetically, you’re descended from that ‘old family’ too.

on Ancestry, if you can upload family portraits from the 18th century, I would say you are an old family.

I've only heard it used by Vampires.

Although The Hunger is set in NYC in the early Eighties, Miriam (the glorious Catherine Deneuve) and John (David Bowie) relationship dates back 200 years (their anniversary gifts must be spectacular!). but in actual flashbacks thirsty Miriam, is seen cavorting in Ancient Egypt... I'd love to know what moisturiser she's using as she looks absolutely fab! Sadly John doesn't fare so well...

That is definitely a wealth thing!

‘Old family’ is also about the preservation of the male line and name. Lots of people don’t have that because of a generation where only girls were born etc…

My family name dies with my generation because there are no children that bear that name in the generation below mine. If there was a substantial estate to inherit (and it was 100+ years ago) a distant male with the same name would have been found to continue to ‘family’. Tbh in the case of my family I’m not sure where they’d have found one..

Everyone does this though! Look how popular ‘we’re Irish’ is among Americans; or at how popular DNA testing is here, and how people love to brag about having 5% Eastern European or whatever.

People who can’t do this need something to be proud of too, and if that’s having a closer connection to the land then so be it.

Land ownership is wealth, however much it might not feel that way to farmers.

I definitely know what it means, but I don’t set any store by it.

E.g in my small village there is one old family who have lived there for 100s of years. Not sure how many but definitely since the 1400s. They own and farm half the land, big house, local forest and road named after them (think “Woodman copse” and “Woodman Road”), built the first school, half the churchyard is family graves, plaques inside the church. They can tell you some very interesting things about the village if you ask (where the old bakery was, which house was used to shelter Thomas Cromwell’s men etc).

I don’t think they’re better than me (their kids are at the same school and TBF I couldn’t wait to move away from I was born), but I do find it interesting and to them keeping up the family traditions and maintaining their historical connection with the village is hugely important. I have no doubt that they’ll still have people here in another 100 years whereas lord only knows where my kids will be.

Of course everyone is born from generations of others- that’s just biology- but to me an old family means if someone asks you who your ancestors were in the 1600s and what they were doing you can tell them, not because you’ve undertaken the family history project online but because you or a relative live in the same house and probably use some of their furniture daily!

They're talking about ancestry. It only really applies to landed gentry and aristocracy.

Have some people really never come across this before?

I hear it in the farming community, people who have worked the same land for generations, so it isn't necessarily a class and wealth thing.

Yes exactly. That’s what it means. And how it’s used, to mean ‘rich, important, superior’. It’s a very loaded claim.

Until relatively recently there weren’t consistent documented records of births, deaths and marriages, so being able to trace your family back to the Norman Conquest depends on being aristocratic.

That family having only one or a handful of names in that time indicates primogeniture and patriarchal inheritance of property.

So while we’re all as old and interesting as each other genetically, as humans, being an old family - a clearly defined, documented, traceable organised unit - means aristocracy.

No the records become difficult after a certain point.

registration of births deaths and marriages wax brought in in 1836 so before that you are relying on parish records - so the church writing down when someone was christened (usually shortly after birth), married or the funeral (death).

it can get very tricky not least because people did move around a lot especially in times of war (eg during the English civil war a lot of parishes just didn’t keep records of christenings/marriages/funerals) and so you have to spend a lot of time visiting out of the way churches in random parts of the country.

my dad did our family and it took him ten years to get back to 1750. And we had a lot of ancestors in the army so there were good army records for a lot of them.

It means they think they are better than others

I once taught someone who was the 4th generation of that name combination and whose family were reputed to be descended from a major Tudor historical family. The surname matched, but families like that took their geneology and inheritance seriously so it's very likely that it was accurately traced from a source like that for over 450 years.

Much simpler than for an average person like me who can go back to late 1800s based on memories of overlapping generations of relatives then is subject to sourcing around through birth, death, marriage and census records which are more fragmented and get increasingly hard to follow before the 1800s. My family have lived all over the country, some ancestors coming in from other European countries. Various occupations and changes of name so there isn't a sense of continuity for very many generations.