Inescapable

Back from vacation in sunny Spain and beginning to think about my next trip -- to Salt Lake City in two weeks. The Iberian adventure had nothing to do with genealogy -- it was an Elderhostel program in three cities with emphasis on history, art and architecture. But I could not help thinking about the family interconnections (not mine!) among all those monarchs we heard about. In fact, it is just about impossible to go anywhere without finding some intriguing bit of some family's history.

I was reminded that the ill-fated Catherine of Aragon, first wife of England’s Henry VIII, was the daughter of Spain’s Queen Isabella, as was Juana La Loca, poor soul. These references made me run back to my history books for more information. Juana was formally known (in English) as Joanna of Castile, which makes sense, since her father was Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella was “of Castile.” (Yes, the same pair who sponsored Columbus’s trip West.) Whether Juana was actually mad is still the subject of dispute.

Then there was the dreadful family scourge of hemophilia, thought to have originated with a mutation in Queen Victoria’s genes (there are rumours of a dalliance, but thought to be highly unlikely). It was passed through her grand-daughter Alexandra, who married Russian Czar Nicholas II and then carried it to their son; but it also tainted the Spanish royal line -- Queen Victoria’s daughter Beatrice passed it to her daughter Victoria, who married Spain’s Alfonso XIII. They had two afflicted sons, Alfonso and Gonzalo.

Queen Victoria had one hemophiliac son, Leopold, and two daughters who were carriers, the above-named Beatrice, and Alice. She had three grandsons with the disorder, and four grand-daughters who were carriers. In the subsequent generation, there were six affected males.

All these factual musings are the result of a “non-genealogical” trip. Who knew?

Medical family histories

When you're interested in a particular subject, bits and pieces of information about it seem to pop up all the time. The word "genealogy" always catches my eye (of course!), along with "family tree" and other related terms.

I came across a reference to medical "family trees" in a recent issue of the AARP Bulletin. (Yes, I am old enough to get that, and so is everyone else past the age of 50!) The paragraph cited the Government's Health and Human Services web site, which has a form the reader can fill out to create a medical family history. The benefits are obvious – if a pattern of genetic diseases (or even those diseases not yet known to be genetic) is found, one can better prepare for eventualities. The address is: http://www.hhs.gov/familyhistory/ Your physician will thank you.

This discovery led me to find the following book, which is available through the Sonoma County Library System: How healthy is your family tree? A complete guide to tracing your family's medical and behavioral tree / Carol Krause (Simon and Schuster, 1995)

A web search (good old Google) brought up the following as well:

At Genealogy.about.com
"Family health history "/ Ralph Bishop

And at MedicineNet.com
"Your medical roots" / Gina Shaw

Sometimes, though, our medical interests are historic, rather than personal. I have long been interested in the tangled family lines of European royalty, particularly that of Queen Victoria. I even worked out a chart once, while reading a book about her family which did not include its own chart (someone had swiped it). Of course, such charts now are readily available online, and I later found an exhaustive one in a book of photographs, Queen Victoria's family : a century of photographs / by Charlotte Zeepvat. Besides the most fascinating pictures, it includes six pages of charts for her descendants. (Sorry, not at the local library, but you could probably get it on Inter-Library Loan. It was published in the UK by Sutton, 2001.)

Musing on the troubles created by hemophilia, the dread disorder which haunted the Queen's family, I began to be curious as to who was afflicted besides her great-grandchild, Alexis, son of Russia's last Tsar. An internet search produced an abundance of information, some of it in the form of family trees. One of the best, which includes much data on each individual, is found at: http://www.sciencecases.org/hemo/hemo.asp There are at least ten hemophiliac males in three generations.