John Spencer-Churchill and

Gwendoline Bertie

Family Tree

This website contains my family tree in an excel file and separate pages with region specific royal and princely dynasties from which my family is descended or demonstrably related. This page contains three files: a family tree, a list of battles in which my family fought, and a list of the universities they founded.

In November of 2018, my father took a DNA test at ancestry.com in order to learn about his Schofield antecedants. He instead made contact with new cousins and discovered that my grandfather was in fact Henry Winston Peregrine Spencer-Churchill, son of John Spencer-Churchill and Gwendoline Bertie. My wife, a month earlier, while watching library videos of the Churchills, had serendipitously noticed the family resemblance, and a brother of mine was already aware of the family rumours of a link in 2012. Frankly, to me, despite the stark DNA evidence, my father looked much more like his step-father. As well, I find myself constantly reverting to formative values and guiding family anecdotes of my original Schofield family.

That same night I embarked on wikipedia to build a quick family tree, which I suspected would take me 3 or 4 hours. I had previously assembled the records of 100 of my maternal Hungarian relatives, and my father had traveled even, to identify 60 of his maternal English and assumed Schofield family, over the previous 15 years. That night did not end. After exhausting 6,700 ancestors on wikipedia, I then embarked on peerage.com, geni.com and other sites, and after two and half years, by 2021, I had identified 60,000+ direct ancestors (the file actually exceeds 75,000, but these include difficult to distinguish duplications), with expectations that my ultimate total number would exceed 100,000. I cannot conceal my impression that this number of known ancestors is inconceivable and seemingly absurd, but the family tree file has been included for examination and falsification (posted to the top right of this page).

I started out interested in genealogy as a substitute for religion (as I was virtually born an atheist) and so went the direction of ancestor worship. I had in fact asked my father, on his retirement in the 1990s, to address the issue of our family origins, which were largely unknown. Like many people, I thought I could derive meaning from discovering my origins, but instead was cursed with a bottomless pit, that I did not have the time to fully explore (it takes a day to add 250 individuals, so 60,000 ancestors would be 240 days of work). Furthermore, the sheer number of people revealed by the process does reduce sophisticated individuals and families, who clearly had successful survival and reproductive strategies, to nearly-anonymous nodes on an excel sheet (I don't have time to appreciate their biographies). I discovered that ancestor worship only preserves its authoritative religious function when you don't really know who your ancestors were. The pious filial Chinese practice of worshipping a paternal great grand-parent in a small shrine in the corner of one's home, only retains its mystical value if one does not actually know the person or their thousands of antecedents. While on the one-hand it is important to recall the difficult life all of our ancestors led, which successfully brought us here, including generations of hard work and overcoming instances of extreme hardship, some of our ancestors were thick, lazy and uncommendable. The religious preoccupation, ever seeking a mystery analogous to our lives, has since drifted me from my tracing relatives, to a focus on haplogroup-anthropology and the deeper mysteries of our origins as a species. 

As a military history enthusiast, I quickly came across familiar names. When I had assembled the names by dynasty, which forms the bulk of this website, I could see that the Bertie and Dormer families in particular were the makers of European, and by extension, world history. Whereas the Spencer-Churchills have about 6,000 ancestors, of which 2,000 appear on wikipedia, the Dormers have at least 26,000 ancestors, and still counting.

I created this for my children, niece and nephew and cousins, so that they can easily explore their origins (as well as to annoy some of my students into searching for their own genealogies). It is not intended to create arrogance. However, I have seen too many similarities in preference and behavior across generations to attribute everything to learning. At the same time, a family tree of so many people does remind me that all humans can be described as cousins of all other humans, without exception. Were it not for the fact that almost all people forget who their sixteen great-great grandparents were, our common appearance alone would remind us that all people are from the same family. 75,000 years ago, the great Toba volcanic eruption in central Sumatra reduced the homo sapiens sapiens down to a genetic bottleneck of between 10,000 and as few as 900 individuals in East Africa. This is the smallest identifiable group from which modern humans descend, excepting the Neanderthal, Denisovan and ghost species of West Africa.

I am hoping the discrete block of DNA that compelled me to do this will resurface somewhere in my extended family and develop this further.

The family names associated within four generations of the family tree posted here include Lim, Liauw, Ong, Munn, Gombos, Szakony, Tomory, Muranyi, Pscherer, Schopper, Zakarias, Bokross, Munn, Leggett, Frossell, Moorman, Russell, Dyer, Mileham, Bennett, Turner, Wooton, Jerome, Wilcox, Baker, Bertie, Dormer. 

Family Tree

The posted family tree is intended to be a valid account of the family ancestors. It aims to be be transparent, and I therefore invite criticism. It is also intended to be accessible, so I have hypertexted each person node with their internet source. As an excel file, it is easily edited.

It makes use of a number of resources: