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......

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 😂

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

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!

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Ireland’s Guinness family for example.

There’s even a TV series on them now.

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!

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.

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

@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

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.

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.

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.

@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 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.

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.)

That's statistically not quite accurate I think. Those people at a certain point back in time only married each other and there is a finite percentage of children they could have down to NOW. So, while they had a lot of kids back in the day, only a small percentage of people can statistically come from certain lines. You have to go back a long way to get that kind of connection.

But there was a lot of downward mobility too. Remember the younger kids didn’t inherit the family pile and had to make their own way, and most of those wouldn’t have managed to marry into other piles I don’t think, but would actually have to make their own way (shudder).

Ooh I feel fancy now. One of my aunties traced the family tree back to the 1600s. Sadly not aristocratic though! We did own/pass down the village Inn though so I guess had more records than most.

I've only really heard it in terms of Americans eg they trace their family back to the Mayflower rather than newer waves of immigration.

In the UK I'm guessing it's more of a new money/old money thing.
For instance the Spencers are an old family being Noble from the 15th Century.
Unlike Sir Richard Branson's family.

Only Parish records were kept. It blocked some people from getting British Citizenship, because there was no trace of a Scottish relative. During different periods of unrest/civil uprising etc a lot of Churches were burned. Although birth certificates did come into being in 1855, a lot of people still didn't register births, officially, until much later.

Is English your first language OP? It’s a regularly used expression.