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......

Changingplace · Today 07:20
sesquipedalian · Today 07:16
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.

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.

What they mean is that of all the millions of direct ancestors that everyone has, going back that far, they can name one of them from that time. Obviously, they were aristocratic/landed, for records to have been kept. They can follow that one line, or maybe a few more which married in, back that far, but what about all the others?

And yes, I see a lot of that stuff among Americans - "Daughters of the Revolution" , forsooth.

It’s not about simply being able to trace your family back, it’s about having a notable lineage, so in the Uk it’s aristocracy or royal lines, and I suspect in the US it would be about being able to trace back to the Mayflower times but having been a well known land-owning family for all that time.

For example, my mother in law can trace her family back 15 generations but they were pretty much all farmers or minor landowners, so they are not an old family.

I have been thinking about it, and in this country (UK) it mostly seems to come with a qualifier, the county or town or district, in my experience. So they might be "an old Somerset family" or "an old Chesterfield family" or "an old Romney Marsh family", but not simply "an old family".

I could be completely wrong, but I think that must be what has been niggling me about this question. My mother's grandfather's family was an old Yorkshire family, in that a member of that family appeared in a parish record in Richmond area some time in the fourteenth century, and some at least of them had tended to live around the same place since (while the others scattered to the four winds and four of the other continents), but when her grandfather moved out of Yorkshire he ceased to have any claim to anything other then "he came from an old Yorkshire family", and was no longer "one of an old Yorkshire family", and she and her siblings definitely were not seen as part of any "old family". Oxford didn't care about his lineage. (To do him credit, nor did he as far as we know.)

Not even just that but they must be somewhat relevant to that ancestor. Eg a great-x-grandchild. Not just a distant offshoot without current note. My dad can trace back to ‘the conquest’ but his is a cadet branch that became poor many centuries ago and ended up in the mines 🙃 So there may have been someone in our family that’s an ‘old family’ but we aren’t enough of a notable family now for us to count as part of it.

I can't trace my family back more than 100 years, due to being refugees on one side and immigrants on the other. And no notable on either side. So I guess we're not an old family, as I lack rootedness in any place.

GoldenCupsatHarvestTime · Today 21:02
Not even just that but they must be somewhat relevant to that ancestor. Eg a great-x-grandchild. Not just a distant offshoot without current note. My dad can trace back to ‘the conquest’ but his is a cadet branch that became poor many centuries ago and ended up in the mines 🙃 So there may have been someone in our family that’s an ‘old family’ but we aren’t enough of a notable family now for us to count as part of it.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles, indeed.

That's how it is in Wales. It's more about land and the family around you.

Honestly? I think it’s quite a weird thing to say about your own family. Mainly because all families are old - if not all are as well documented. I think if you have to announce it, it probably isn’t true. A bit like being famous - if someone is properly famous, the word is redundant. If not then it is a lie.

When I have recognised people’s surnames (in the UK), the people themselves have tended to downplay being a descendant of someone impressive.

It's just a snobby thing that snobby people say - part of their 'entitled' mindset. Take no notice.
If we go along with the concept, we just solidify it and add to its reality when it's only a labelling concept anyway.

I believe it's used to imply that their family has more values than others. It's both snobbery and classist.

Yes, my so many great gm was a Lady Sarah Savage of Ardkeen and was part of an old Irish family but I think she was disowned due to her marrying someone beneath her. They could trace their line from the Norman conquest.

It's a class thing, usually used by the aristocracy who can trace their family back several generations because they have power and money. Poor people were too busy trying to survive to be able to do this.

Never heard of it 🤔

It pops up a lot in Agatha Christie, Victorian novels etc as a class and lineage signifier, a way of 'placing' people socially, particularly in the context of potential suitability in the marriage market. "Young Thomas Twistleton-Temple? Oh, yes, from the Yorkshire Twistleton-Temples - a very old family. ". In Agatha Christie 'old families' (relatively impoverished, but devoted to their crumbling ancestral homes) contrasted with 'new money' (wealthy upstarts who don't know how to behave in polite society) is a prominent and repeated theme.

But never said in those books by someone about their OWN family, I suspect.

It's sometimes used in the country, just to mean someone's family has been in the area a while. You can look in the parish records of a church and see that e.g. a particular farming family had been in the area for a LONG time. Freehold farms usually pass(ed) to a son, and even for tenant farmers, landlords have historically been happy for a son to take on the tenancy after the father if the family were known and liked, so you'll see the same surname repeated over the generations in the books of births/marriages/deaths.

All of these meanings (wealthy, rural, established) are essentially inaccurate. No-one's family is any older than anyone else's. We all have a series of ancestors tracing back to the African plains.

It's just an attempt to impose value onto some spurious continuity which makes sense in a country with a monarchy, but is no less ridiculous.

The line in The Magician's Nephew is that they were an old Dorsetshire family.

They're clearly middle class in a nice town house with staff, but there is an implication that that branch of the family is not as wealthy as previous generations, with the pretentious Uncle Andrew scrounging off Aunt Letty and also supporting Diggory's ill mother.

Uncle Andrew uses the claim as a mark of respectability.

Iirc, the father is working away and at the conclusion of the story, there is an extended family death with an inheritance that allows him to come home and the family to return to the the family estate which is where The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe is later set.

I think the mother is dying and his father is definitely absent somewhere (India?), but it's a long time since I read it. Wasn't the town-house Letty's rather than Andrew's?

The house of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is Digory's house, and I think he inherited it from his father, who at the end of The Magician's Nephew inherited it and a whole lot of money from a great-uncle Kirke; and Kirke was Digory's name but not Uncle Andrew's, because Polly called him "Mr Ketterly" when she asked if he really was mad. So the LtWatW house and Uncle Andrew's family don't go with the same surname. And Digory's mother must be Andrew and Letty's younger sister, because Letty speaks of her as "dear little Mabel"; her husband's family fortune would have nothing in particular to do with Uncle Andrew and his Old Dorsetshire Family. The Kirkes might be from anywhere, even Dorsetshire except that the Pevensies saw mountains on their way to Professor Kirke's house, but they are not part of Uncle Andrew's family except by marriage.

Yes, Uncle Andrew making a rather spurious claim sounds right. As he did in the bit which has always stayed with me: "Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny", which Digory sees straight through as meaning "I think I can do anything I like to get anything I want". I have thought it quietly to myself over the years when encountering charlatans who think they are magicians/healers/gurus/Better Than Mere Mortals!

But in this case, "comes from" rather than "part of" an old Dorsetshire family would be right, along with the vulgarity of him making the claim at all. If people don't simply know it, then you aren't really it, is how I feel it goes really. (And how Jadis could be expected to know what he was attempting to boast about goodness only knows!) I suppose he used his irrelevant family connection to comfort himself for having to scrounge off his sister Letty.

(And now I am going to have to re-read it to see how badly I have mis-remembered what is really in the text.)