Are your Ancestors too posh?

Hopefully I won't make Peter more depressed with this post, but seeing it's my loss of a 'gateway ancestor', I think I should be alright, but the article in the newsletter with the above title made me think of something.

Like Peter, most of my ancestors would be too boring to encourage my presence in a Who do you think you are? episode - bar a couple of master mariners (including some boat sinking and a bravery award) and a private in the 79th Cameron Highlanders who fought in Crimea and died in India. But I did think I had a very tenuous link to Robert the Bruce and various dukes and other aristocrats...

Or at least I did until last weekend, when I was reexamining a census return and spotted a birthplace which for some reason I hadn't computed (perhaps I found it after I had decided on a different record and before I knew this ancestor had married twice). That lead to a baptismal record for my 3x great grandfather that I hadn't seen before, and had a new set of parents.

These parents seemed more likely - the father was a calico printer, an occupation his son shared, but didn't have the same tenuous links with royalty and aristocracy. Given this more realistic set of parents, I pruned the branch with the royal links and the dukes and other aristocrats.

The 700 have been replaced with some block printers and a joiner... and my tree is much more realistically sans any sign of blue blood.