This pedigree is really where I started with computerised genealogy, or even with genealogy at all. My father had got the College of Arms to give him a pedigree of the people involved in an achievement of arms that his father had obtained off them around 1928. So I thought I would enter it into a computer program. Then I asked one or two people about it and then I began to wonder how accurate it was. We had been taught to believe that the College of Arms was the fount of all things genealogical so any suspicion that they were not was little short of sacriledge.

Perhaps three years later the cracks had begun to appear. I had retired and acquired a copy of Complete Peerage (which is much nearer a fount of lots of things genealogical) and found a few differences in the descents from the lines in the College's tree. Eventually I presented this in a chart and what you can see now is my re-working of the chart to try and make it a bit simpler.

If you were to print this out, it would occupy three sheets of A2 equals 12 sheets of A4 - though one or two of the latter might be blank.