Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/289

 THE ANCESTOR 229 Richard Talbot ' who obtained a confirmation (by charter) from King John (1199-1216) of the lands of Malahide/ to be Souls', 1284'j it will be obvious that there is need of a really- trustworthy pedigree, supported by the charter spoken of and by other proofs. The Talbots deserve a better fate than to have their history made absurd by such statements as those we have quoted. It is the object of The Ancestor^ while exposing on the one hand the wild beliefs and absurd fables which pass current for family history, to construct on the other trustworthy pedigrees, and to render the genuine descent of our really ancient families even more distinguished than it is by enabling its splendour to shine undimmed by the baseless pretensions of others. It is, for instance, an injustice to such a house as that of the St. Lawrences of Howth to assert, as above, that their Talbot neighbours ^ are the only family in the United Kingdom * of such antiquity on the soil, while in England itself there are several houses — the Gresleys for instance, the Shirleys, the Wrottesleys — who have held their lands in the male line as long as the Talbots of Malahide or even for longer. So we need not travel so far afield as ^ the continent of Europe * to disprove the assertion made by the writer. It is always interesting to trace these wild stories to their source. In this case that source would seem to have been an article which made its appearance some twenty years ago in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle} It was there similarly stated that ^ Henry the Second created Richard de {sic) Talbott who is mentioned in the Domesday Book, Lord of Malahide,' and we recognize the origin of an amazing sentence among the extracts above in that which follows : — There is no other family in the three kingdoms, nor for that matter in the whole of Europe, that has preserved the same blood and lineage in a direct male issue. But even the Brooklyn Daily Eagle did not start the story, for its statement that Richard de sic) Talbott {sic) figures in Domesday is duly found, under Talbot de Malahide, in ^ See Antiquarian Magazine and Bibliographer (1883), iv. 251-4.
 * witness to a deed dated at Clontarf on the Morrow of All