If my ancestry is from Italy and Lebanon, is there a good chance I might be related to the ancient Romans?

Question

I'm minoring in Greek and Roman civilization, and I've always wondered if I could ever trace my lineage back to the ancient Romans. Is there any way to do this (I know it's like 2000 years)?

Answer 1

The core concept of genealogy is tracing ancestry through valid documentation/ records.  I don't doubt that you may have Roman ancestry.  I do not believe you would be able to find proof of this, using normal genealogy routes.

Some persons claim they trace their lineage to Adam and Eve. To be as polite as possible, I don't think their documentation is reliable.

Answer 2

i suppose it's possible.  it would require a lot of research and even a lot of travel to find out, and it would help if your family kept good records; if not, it will be even harder.

Answer 3

Unless you are Prince Charles (or one of his cousins) or one of the Emperor of Japan's kids, you generally get bogged down in the 1500 - 1700 range.

Every single woman who came up pregnant within 8 miles of the King claimed she had caught his eye and her b*****d child had Royal Blood. She names him "LeRoi", wink wink, and his real dad, the boy next door or the 1647 version of the Direct TV dish installer, goes unrecorded. You, poor fool, think Henry II (the Randy) was your 22nd great grandfather.

Records get lost, burned, water-soaked. Priests demand money for baptisms, funerals and weddings, peasants refuse, births, deaths and marriages go unrecorded.

Most of us who have been doing this long enough have two or three lines to Charlemagne, 782 - 843 (I think) but we don't believe them, if we have any common sense.

Answer 4

Actually, it is possible. It's not inexpensive, nor is it something you can do on the internet. But if you ever get a summer in Italy, yes you can trace your family back farther than people think. The Senators and Citizens of Rome were well-documented. There are censuses going back long before the birth of Jesus. The hard part is that there weren't surnames. So you have to track records very carefully so that you're not overlaying one family over another inadvertantly. The problem people have is that they can't afford the trip to Italy, don't have the time to sit in archives reading through obscure records, or the patience to do serious intellectual research. But it can be done and the more prominent your family was in the Empire, the easier it is to find the confirmation records.