Genealogy Story – An Unexpected Connection

Yesterday afternoon as I awoke from my nap, I was sitting on the couch with my leg up and so decided to turn on the TV. I was doing some channel surfing to see what was on and had not gotten very far when I discovered that our local PBS station had a travel show. It immediately caught my eye because this particular show was about visiting two cities in Belgium – Bruges and Brussels. Most of my international travels were business-related but when I had gotten stranded in Europe because of 9/11/2001, these were the two cities I had spent some time in while waiting for flights back to the US to resume. I have written about them here - http://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/09/remembering-911-stranded-in-europe.html.

I had missed the first part of the documentary on Bruges, including I suspect the canals around the city and the Belfry, which I had climbed on that day. But the part then being shown was of the Church of Our Lady (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Our_Lady,_Bruges), which we had also walked through on that day. The camera panned around the church, then stopped at two burial tombs of Charles the Bold and his daughter Mary. I quickly jotted down the name of Charles. The rest of the documentary took the high-speed train to Brussels (which I had taken), then looked at many interesting sights in that city which I had also had the opportunity to see.

Knowing that most of the royal families in Europe were connected to each other, either by blood or by marriage, I traced the family tree of Charles the Bold, starting in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_the_Bold). He lived from 1433 to 1477 and his family line went back through many of the king of various parts of France. 300 years earlier, his great*8 grandfather was Philip II of France (1165-1223). Philip was the son of Louis VII and Adela of Champagne. But Adela was a name that looked familiar to me and I left the male line I had been following to look at hers.

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Sure enough, I found that Adela was the daughter of Theobald II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobald_II,_Count_of_Champagne). And I had written about Theobald earlier as he was part of the family tree of the French line of the de Pierrepont family (http://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/03/genealogy-story-william-conqueror-and.html) through his illegitimate son, Hugh. This meant that Theobald II was the great*10 grandfather of Charles the Bold, but that he is also an ancestor of the French line of the de Pierrepont family.

What a great connection! Because I know that my distant French cousins (some of whom I am friends with on Facebook), are descended from Theobald II.  And to now realize that when I was touring around Bruges on that day in September, 2001, I had viewed the tomb of a distant cousin (11^th cousin, several times removed) of these French cousins.