The question everyone asks first

How Far Back

The family tree reaches the kings of Denmark in the fifteenth century. This archive reaches a Gloucestershire yeoman in 1654. This page explains the difference, which is two grafts and about a hundred people.

"How far back does it go?" has four different answers for this family, and which one you get depends entirely on how much you are prepared to take on trust.

If you accept…	Generations	Ancestors	Reaches	Note
Everything the tree asserts	24	243	Frederick I of Denmark, d. 1533	Accepts both grafts below. This archive does not.
Accepting the Sneyd graft only	17	172	Thomas Dabridgecourt of Longdon Hall, b. 1531	Accepts the Keele descent, rejects Hornby.
Accepting the Hornby graft only	24	216	Frederick I of Denmark	Accepts the Holderness descent, rejects Keele.
What this archive can actually evidence	≈7	—	as far as records this archive has read will carry it	Rejects both grafts AND its own unevidenced upper storey. See below.

Two grafts carry almost all the depth. Of 243 ancestors in the tree, 71 hang on a single unevidenced link in the D'Arcy line and 27 on a single disproved link in the Sneyd line. They do not overlap. Remove both and 145 people remain — which is still a substantial family, reaching the middle of the seventeenth century, and every one of them stands on something better than wishful thinking.

Every one of those 98 is now listed by name. The register marks them above a graft so you can see exactly who leaves when the joins do. The register →

Re-audited 13 September 2026

What a week of registers did to these numbers

This page's figures were an audit of what the archive could defend. Since then the two deepest lines have actually been searched, and the result moved in both directions at once.

The line	Was	Is now
The Saniger line the archive's oldest claim	twelve generations, resting on other people's trees — untested	contradicted in the middle. The three Dursley baptisms that fit the tree's dates have three different fathers, and no Saniger baptism exists in Gloucestershire in the 1800s decade. →
The Sneyd line after Keele Hall was disproved	resting on a 1742 Madeley baptism, four years off the date the tree gives	three of four links documented. The 1769 marriage at Madeley, Samuel's baptism there in 1781, and Samuel Charles's at Hanley in 1811. Only the 1746 baptism of William the weaver is still missing. →
The D'Arcy line Robert, and the Hornby graft above him	nothing between his 1776 commission and his 1827 will	better. Joseph D'Arcy baptised Portsea, 19 March 1780, father Robert, mother Jean. His marriage and his eldest son are documented. →
The Wakefield join how the family reaches England at all	one line in a Queensland death register, 1909	much better. The whole household found in the 1841 census at St Paul, Bristol, with a Sinegar widow living in it. →

The honest figure has not moved, and the reason it has not moved has changed completely. It is still about seven generations. But a week ago the storey above that was unproven; now parts of it have been looked for in the right registers and found to be wrong. An unproven claim might yet be rescued by a document. A contradicted one has to be rebuilt. What was read, and what each source actually holds →

Graft one · unevidenced

The D'Arcys of Hornby Castle

Above Major-General Robert D'Arcy the tree inserts a Thomas (Francis) D'Arcy, said to be born at St James's Palace, carrying two birth years sixty-nine years apart, and descends him from the Earls of Holderness. Through him come 71 ancestors, including — by way of the Schombergs and the house of Oldenburg — the kings of Denmark.

The tree's own note says Robert was "thought to be the illegitimate" son of the 4th Earl, while its structure descends him from the 3rd. No baptism for Robert exists in any indexed English collection; Connolly's Roll, which documents his whole career, records no parentage; the Gentleman's Magazine did not notice his death. Unevidenced, and set out in full. The Hornby claim →

Graft two · disproved, 9 September 2026

The Sneyds of Keele Hall

This one the archive had flagged as suspect — "Sneyd is a Staffordshire gentry name, which is exactly what a drifting pedigree reaches for" — and then left alone. Tested, it fails, and it fails cleanly.

The line as the tree carries it runs down from Keele Hall to Kempsey:

1723Ralph Sneyd, Esq., of Keele · 1723–1793

A real man, and a considerable one: born at Keele 10 December 1723, died at Bath 10 December 1793, squire of Keele Hall and the subject of a Keele University thesis. He is not in this family.

1742William Sneyd · baptised All Saints, Madeley

the graft fails here The tree makes him Ralph's son. The register does not.

1781Samuel Sneyd · grocer, of Hanley

Baptised Madeley, 4 June 1781, father William Sneyd. Married Elizabeth Margaret Oliver at Audlem, Cheshire, 22 October 1809. Died at No. 3 Well Street, Hanley, and was buried there in 1855.

1810Samuel Charles Sneyd · 1810–1885

Born Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent; christened there 28 April 1811. Came to New South Wales in 1832 with the 4th (King's Own) Regiment; married Catherine Margaret Mulcahy at Camden, 13 February 1837. As a sergeant he and Private Richard Smith shot and shot a bushranger dead near the Vale of Clwydd on 30 October 1839 and took the other two. Sergeant-major of the Goulburn Division, chief constable at Moreton Bay from 1849, and Governor of Brisbane Gaol from 1859. Died at Enoggera, 4 July 1885; buried Toowong.

1837William Hartley Sneyd · Kempsey, New South Wales

The emigrant generation's first Australian-born child, and Ivy Miriam Sneyd's grandfather. The Sneyds →

Three reasons the graft fails

The baptism names a different father. The register of All Saints, Madeley records the baptism of William Sneyd in 1742 — father William Sneyd. Not Ralph. FamilySearch's own tree carries him as William Snead II, 1742–1827, matching a burial at Madeley on 13 May 1827.
The chronology does not work. Ralph Sneyd of Keele was born in December 1723. A son baptised in 1742 would have been fathered when Ralph was eighteen — and at Madeley, a parish with no connection to him.
Ralph's actual children are on record, and William is not among them. Baptisms at Keele and Stone between 1750 and 1760 give Ralph Sneyd's children as Frances, Ralph, Edward, Anne, Elizabeth and Mary — by a wife named Barbara, not the "Margaret Dunning" the tree supplies. His documented heir was Walter Sneyd (1752–1829) of Keele.

And the real line was there all along. The Madeley registers carry it: William Sneyd the elder, of Madeley in the 1720s–40s; his son William, baptised 1742, who married Mary Blackbourne at Madeley on 27 March 1769 and was buried there in 1827; their son Samuel, baptised 4 June 1781, the grocer of Hanley; and his son Samuel Charles, who sailed for New South Wales. Set out in full → Losing Keele costs eleven generations of borrowed gentry and gains five of documented Staffordshire tradespeople.

What was really going on. There were Sneyds at Keele Hall and there were Sneyds — often written Snead — at Madeley, five miles off, who were tradespeople. Our family is the second kind: a Madeley labouring or artisan family that produced a grocer at Hanley, whose son took the King's shilling and sailed for New South Wales. Somebody, at some point, joined the two on the strength of a shared surname in a shared county. Removing the join costs the archive eleven generations and a descent from Warwickshire gentry — and costs it nothing that was ever true.

What survives

Twelve generations, and a Gloucestershire yeoman

Strip out both grafts and 145 ancestors remain, reaching generation twelve. The oldest of them are not aristocrats and there is no castle anywhere in the list:

William Sanigar, born 1654, and William Saniger, born at Berkeley, Gloucestershire, 12 October 1679 — reached through Hannah Saniger, Miriam Wakefield's mother, on the Bristol side.
Edward Cotton, born at Ashton-under-Hill, Gloucestershire, 6 January 1687.
Lydia Lyon, born at Market Drayton, Shropshire, 3 March 1683.
William Ward (1700) and Martha Lewis (1702) — the family of Jean Ward, whom Major-General Robert D'Arcy married at Portsea in 1779, and whose line does not depend on the Hornby graft at all.
William Garden and Jean Veitch, of Scotland.

Twelve generations to the 1650s, out of Gloucestershire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Somerset and Scotland. That is a long way back by any ordinary standard. It is only disappointing if you had been promised Denmark.

Tested 10 September 2026 — and this one is ours

A third graft, and the archive built it itself

Everything above is about other people's mistakes. This section is about ours, and it is the most serious thing on this site.

The figure this page has been calling "what this archive will defend" — 144 ancestors, twelve generations, back to a Gloucestershire yeoman of 1654 — was never tested against the archive's own standard. When it finally was, on 10 September 2026, it did not survive.

What those 144 ancestors actually rest on	People	Share
A record set — a register, a census, a civil registration, a printed roll	8	5.6%
Only other people's family trees — Guthrie Web Site, Saniger Web Site, FamilySearch Family Tree, Our Huge Family Tree	56	38.9%
No source at all	79	54.9%
Mixed or unclear	1	0.7%

And the shape of it is worse than the total. Of the 60 ancestors above generation seven — that is, everyone older than about 1780 — exactly one rests on a record set. The rest are family trees or nothing.

Above generation seven this archive has been repeating other people's genealogy and calling it its own honest figure.

The sources page has said from the start that "a family tree is not a source", and that a claim resting only on one is marked family lore however many trees repeat it. That rule was applied to the Hornby descent and to Keele Hall. It was never applied to the branch this page holds up as solid ground.

The deepest line, and what it is made of

The Sanigers of Berkeley are the reason this page claims 1654. Six generations, every one with an exact christening date, running Berkeley → Elmore → Ashton-under-Hill → Wotton-under-Edge → Brimpsfield → Bisley, with Market Drayton in Shropshire married in.

Generation	Date given	Place	Rests on
Hannah Saniger	b. 23 Jul 1805	Berkeley	Langford Family Site · FamilySearch Family Tree
John Saniger	b. 15 May 1769	Berkeley	Guthrie Web Site · FamilySearch Family Tree
Thomas Saniger	b. 23 Aug 1744	christened Berkeley	Saniger Web Site · FamilySearch Family Tree
Thomas Saniger	b. 11 Dec 1711	christened Berkeley	Guthrie Web Site
William Saniger	b. 12 Oct 1679	Berkeley	Saniger Web Site · FamilySearch Family Tree
William Sanigar	b. 1654	—	Gainard Family Tree Web Site

Those dates are precise, consistent and entirely plausible. They may well all be right — Berkeley's registers survive and somebody has clearly read them. But this archive has not seen them, and a date copied from a stranger's website is not evidence just because it has a day and a month on it. family lore

This has now been attempted — see Berkeley, Gloucestershire. FreeREG's Berkeley transcript runs 1600–1677, so it can test only the oldest of the six generations. It produces one good candidate — William Sainger, baptised 24 May 1655, son of Edward Sainger of Wanswell — among three Williams, and leaves the other five generations exactly where they were.

What would still fix it. The parish registers of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, held at Gloucestershire Archives and substantially transcribed on FreeREG. Six christenings between 1654 and 1805 would turn the deepest line in this archive from hearsay into the best-evidenced thing on the site. It is one afternoon's work by somebody who can reach the registers. Queued at the top →

Until then, the honest figure is not twelve generations. It is about seven — as far as the records this archive has actually read will carry it — with everything above that marked as what it is. Recorded with the rest of our errors →

The same shape twice

Both grafts have an identical structure, and it is worth naming because it is the commonest failure in family history. A documented working family — a Royal Engineer, a Hanley grocer — is traced back correctly for several generations. Then, at the point where the parish records thin out, it is joined to a landed family of the same surname in the same county, on no evidence, and the landed family's own well-published pedigree carries the line back another ten or fifteen generations for free.

The join is always the weakest link and always the least examined, because everything above it looks so solid — and it is solid. The Earls of Holderness are real. Ralph Sneyd of Keele is real. Neither of them is ours.

How this archive labels claims → · What is still open →