Patrick Delaforce (edited:Ken Baldry) FAMILY HISTORY RESEARCH Vol. 2 The European Dimension FAMILY HISTORY RESEARCH: volume Two The European Dimension by Patrick Delaforce, edited by Ken Baldry Volume One took the romantic story of the Delaforces over the last five hundred years. This volume begins with more about the fate of the Delaforce Huguenot ancestors and then, takes the story back into the days of the Roman Empire’s decline and fall, through the not-so-dark ages to meet up with the story of volume One. The upper arms are those of Gascony, the lower, those of Navarre. FAMILY HISTORY RESEARCH Vol. 2 The European Dimension FAMILY HISTORY RESEARCH Vol. 2 The European Dimension by Patrick Delaforce (edited by Ken Baldry) Copyright © Patrick Delaforce and Ken Baldry 2003 The authors assert their moral rights under the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988 This edition published by Art & Science Ltd 2003 and set in Palatino type Contents Introduction to Volume Two (by Ken Baldry) Chapter 24 - The Huguenots at Bay Chapter 25 - What the French historians say about the Delaforce family Chapter 26 - The Hundred Years War Chapter 27 - The family in the Auvergne Chapter 28 - The Bordeaux wine growers Chapter 29 - The Gascon merchants in London - 13th century Chapter 30 - The Gironde and Gascony in the 12th and 15th Century Chapter 31 - The Prelates Chapter 32 - The Poitevins, Battle of Hastings and Domesday Book Chapter 33 - King John and William - the Feudal Adventurer Chapter 34 - Richard, Coeur de Lion’s friend - William Chapter 35 - The Mysterious Earls of Albermarle and the Conqueror’s Family Chapter 36 - The Roll of Battle Abbey by William Tailler & The Domesday Book by William the Conqueror Chapter 37 - The Fezensacs and Armagnacs Chapter 38 - The Princes of Verdun Chapter 39 - The Dukes of Gascony Chapter 40 - The Kings of Navarre Chapter 41 - "The Song of Roland" Chapter 42 - New approaches (by Ken Baldry) Chapter 43 - The Merovingians (by Ken Baldry) Chapter 44 - The Visigoths (by Ken Baldry) Chapter 45 - Gascony and Navarre revisited (by Ken Baldry) Chapter 46 - The Delaforce Outrageous Claim (by Ken Baldry) Appendix I - French Sources of Genealogy & Family History Appendix II - Latin Chartes Appendix III - Spotting Delaforces in the Street (by Ken Baldry) Appendix IV - Whatever happened to Gersinde? (by Ken Baldry) Family History Research Vol. 2 - ʻThe European Connectionʼ by Patrick Delaforce, ed. Ken Baldry © Patrick Delaforce & Ken Baldry 2003 Page 1 Introduction to Volume Two By Ken Baldry In about 1980, Volume One of Patrick Delaforce’s ‘Family History Research - The French Connection’ was published. My maternal aunt bought copies for all the family, as her name is Winifred Dullforce, which she thought was a possible anglicisation & contraction of De La Force. Although I am keenly interested in history & have hundreds of history books, I was under the impression at that time that Dullforce was derived from Dolfuss, a Germanic name. For a musician & mountaineer, imbued with German culture & speaking the language after a fashion, this was an attractive prospect. For the older members of the family with experience of two World Wars, it was not. I did glance at the book but Patrick had been persuaded by his publishers to make a mistake of presentation - the first & very lengthy chapter is a list of all the sources he had consulted &, for someone who had not taken much interest in the subject of genealogy, except, thankfully, to pin my grandmother down to helping me make a family tree when she was in her eighties, this chapter was somewhat adversive. I put the book on the appropriate shelf & forgot it. In this edition of Volume Two, I have pushed the similar source material into appendices. All this changed in February 2000. I returned from skiing to receive an e-mail message from Terry Dullforce, someone of who’s existence I had been unaware & who I had & have never met. However, my cousin’s husband is keenly interested in genealogy & had circulated other members of the Dullforce family with everyone’s e-mail addresses. Terry’s father had died & among his papers was evidence that our mutual great-great-great grand-father, James Dullforce, was the son of William Delforce. William Delforce features in Patrick’s book. Suddenly, I had my maternal family tree back into the 14th Century & meanwhile, my interest in genealogy had been kindled by trying to help my wife to find her roots. (Her maiden name is Saltsman, which was originally Saltzmann, something she discovered in 1996 but that is another story available on the Internet). Volume One was out-of-print, so I wrote to Patrick to ask if I might put it on the Internet’s World Wide Web. As a somewhat retired computer professional, I keep my hand in as a webmaster & had soon discovered that people will read almost anything on the Web. Patrick welcomed my suggestion & I found that I had yet another retirement job, protecting him from importunate Force family members world-wide, as I had also joined the ‘Rootsweb’ mailing list for both the Force family & the Huguenots. I set up a ‘Force Scrapbook’ of hopefully useful information, on the Web. I also sought my father’s family & was similarly given a vast amount of information after one simple piece of research. Believeing I owed it to everyone to put some work in myself, I started a Web-based Baldry Family History Society, which has been very successful but that again, is another story. Patrick gave Volume One an Introduction intended to serve for the whole book, so it has intriguing ‘tasters’ of what would appear in Volume Two but Volume Two did not appear. Patrick & I remained in contact, as I used the web site to advertise his other books. I bought one myself & he gave me another. They are military histories of World War II & very valuable, as they are extremely detailed & draw on his own experience with the Royal Tank Regiment. I hinted that I would be interested in seeing his sketches for Volume Two but Patrick said he had passed them on to a cousin. I requested an introduction to the cousin but one was not forthcoming, so I did not press the matter. I did believe that Patrick was better occupied with the military history than the family stuff. However, I did follow up his clues in a desultory manner, when I had spare time from my other retirement jobs. I proceded by collecting as much information as I could about the family trees of the people mentioned in Patrick’s clues & trying to fit them together in a coherent manner. Being me, I also published them on the Web, hoping (without success) that someone might e-mail me with a startling revelation of the relationships. I let him know this occasionally by sending him ‘nuggets’ among other news. Family History Research Vol. 2 - ʻThe European Connectionʼ by Patrick Delaforce, ed. Ken Baldry © Patrick Delaforce & Ken Baldry 2003 Page 1 In June 2003, my wife & I visited Gascony to see the family villages & towns as, by this time, I knew much about the doings of the various Merovingians, Gascons and Visigoths of the Delaforce blood line. This provided as many questions as answers, which I followed up when we returned. One fact was that one of the many Grandpa Bernards had built the ‘new’ (1491) castle at Fourcès, one of our deeper roots. I made a book of all the photographs from the Gascon trip, with my diary entries & material from the ‘Force Scrapbook’ & sent this to Patrick. I felt that this was the least I could do, in view of the fantastic amount of work he had put into the volume I did know about. To my astonished delight, he wrote me an appreciative letter, covering a parcel containing a mass of material relating to Volume Two, including most of it in typescript. Having been trained as a child in the joys of delayed gratification, I immediately made up a book of all my material & sent it to Patrick before examining his. When I did, I found that I may have made a couple of mistakes in my research, which hopefully would have come out in the long run but that I was getting very warm indeed. I have added something about this in my own Chapters 42-46 of this book. I have also inserted ‘nuggets’ in italics, maps and photographs into Patrick’s text. The chapter numbering here is not that of Patrick’s typescript. His started at Chapter 21 but Volume One has Chapters 20-23, which break up the story, as they contain information about foreign Delaforce families, while Chapters 2-19 gradually move back in time. I guessed that something urged Patrick to add the foreign information as an afterthought & to put Volume One to press at the time he did. Who is a Delaforce? ...or rather, Who is a proper Delaforce? In volume One, Patrick disposed of the Caumont family, who hijacked the name when they took over the village of La Force in Perigord. Unfortunately, correct spelling is a 20th century fad & before that, it was a casual art, exacerbated by the illiterate or the noble dictating to clerks, often in what the clerks may have thought a rough Gascon accent, who then wrote down what they thought they had heard. It is necessary to remember that French is an evolved Latin language, that the Visigoths arrived in the area of Gascony with a different evolved Latin, which became influenced by the completely non-Sanskrit-based Basque language.