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

[Iwascupbearertotheking]

I don't understand what this means?

Biologically and historically, we have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents etc etc.

Our foremothers can all be traced back to pre-neolithic eras. This is the case for everyone, not an elite few. And people tend to use their family name rather than creating a new one (yes, yes, there are exceptions)

So what does "an old family" actually mean?

YANBU - I haven't got a clue
YABU - Ah ha, it means this......

I’ve only ever heard it said by Americans. In that context it’s still classist (and colonialist), but kind of makes sense Nat some families have been established in the US for longer.

I guess you can trace your history back accurately many generations. My family name is due to die with my mum as she’s the last with that name. She only had sisters who all had girls, who then got married. Both my maternal grandparents were only children. My mum reverted to her maiden name after her divorce but her sisters are married.

YANBU. It tends to signify 'We've lived in the same place for several generations, and have managed to hold on to some of our ancestral wealth'. Which is nothing to be proud of when thousands of landless peasants were doing all the work.

That you know where the family has been- it’s a family that kept records or was in the records. It probably also involves at least one property. I know where my grandparents lived for example, and you take you to their homes. Before that I have no idea.
An old family may have a home that’s been in the family for generations.

I thought it was used in relation to ‘important’ people so in America names like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt or Astor. And in UK the royal line.

I had a well-placed friend at university, who once remarked that they could trace their family back to about 1080, “but of course we don’t actually go back to the Conquest.” That’s an old family.

Are you American? I don’t hear it used in UK really.

Agree with PP it makes me think of establishment wealthy families from USA.

Agreed, I usually think it’s a family who have all lived in the same area for a long time, as someone who’s moved around a reasonable amount I’m never entirely sure why this is something to be hugely proud of.

People who have always lived in the area I currently live in can be a bit weird about it, like they can’t even imagine living elsewhere and will fall to bits if their kids move anywhere more than half an hour away.

But, given the time, I'm sure you could as well?

It's not like your GGGGGGG Grandad suddenly materialised in 1709 to the consternation to everyone in the room?

Documented lineage. Usually means aristocratic - so had property in the same place for a long time, so documented history when most people didn’t have that Fundamentally, a strongly patriarchal habit (related to property ownership) so a clear traceable line with the same surname.

While that’s interesting to be able to do that, everyone’s families must all go back this far & further or we literally wouldn’t be here.

It's traditionally meant to mean you've been a family of note/importance/higher class/riches, whatever denotes 'class' in your society, for a long time. Like 'old money' or the way people a hundred years ago might say "Thompkinson-Smythe? Of the Minnesota Thompkinson-Smythes?" Basically your family 'matters' and has done for some time. Just being able to trace your family back isn't the issue, we all know we have grandparents etc, but to snobby people that's not important because they were 'nobodies'.

So only privileged families are able to meet that criteria in that argument?

Poor old Jane Bloggs who comes from a line of subsistence farmers, whose family have been tenants of Lord Aristocrat, fire hundreds of years, wouldn't be?

(I'm not being deliberately obtuse I promise)

But I suppose it suggests that the people in your family were "important enough" for their names, DOBs, marriages etc to be documented somewhere and that documentation preserved.
It also likely means your family is white for generations. My mum is Indian, so I can trace her line back to her grandparents just based on her memory of what she was told as a child. But prior to that, her family was poor and lived in a village, so nobody's birth or death was written down anywhere. I would imagine that's true of many non-white or mixed families.
My dad is white European for several generations, but again, they were poor, so the documentation of his lineage is patchy.

I'm not sure I've ever heard it. Is it an American thing?

Yep, pretty much, because the aristo's would argue Jane Bloggs' family never particularly mattered so why should anyone care how far they go back? Not that I agree with that mind, but that's the point of terms like "an old family".

I’ve heard it in Britain, from a well-to-do friend talking of her even-better-to-do friend being from “one of Ireland’s oldest families”.

I couldn’t make sense of it at the time for the same reasons as you OP, but that’s because we’re not posh. What it means is you can trace your line and your status back to a family who were documented, landed and monied a long time ago, rather than a short identifiable heritage who just emerged out of the swamp like the rest of us.

Basically it’s an appeal-to-authority, in hereditary form.

One of their ancestors on the male line earned a lot of money/got a title (probably by killing someone or fucking over a load of peasants).

They still hold the family name/title/money.

Nothing to be proud of imo.

Do people really still say this? It sounds more like the kind of attitude that we read about in ninetheenth-century novels.

I know that in America it seems to be a bit of a thing, but isn't that to do with the more specific preoccupation with when your ancestors immigrated to the US? That in itself is a weird one, with earlier immigration arbitrarily lauded and later immigration arbitrarily disdained.

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.

It means they think they are better than others

Should I admit now that I've just done a re-read of CS Lewis's "The Magician's Nephew"?

I've never used the phrase, but listening to you all has affirmed that it is morally repugnant.

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.

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.

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.