Ragnar "Lodbrok" Sigurdsson - 31st Great Grandfather

Hello, Svante :)

Svante Martin Julius is Per Anders Dencker's 12th cousin thrice removed!

Regards from P.A.

Per Anders Dencker, Thank you for your very kind reply to me, I appreciate it, a lot! :-)

Justin Swanström, Thank you too for your posts in dealing with issues such as this, you and Per Anders Dencker seem like very kind people, thank you!

Remi Trygve Pedersen, I am not on Geni.com very much and now I see why, perhaps you should listen to Per and Justin in your way of dealing with such things, had I known my post was going to cause such a problem, I never, believe me, never, would have posted to begin with! There are much nicer and kinder ways of dealing with things. I do wonder if you have "attacked" everyone who posted they are related, if so, I feel for them!!

Donna, I'm sorry if you feel I'm personally attacking you, I asure you I'm not.

I just want everyone to understand that we need to be careful about what we publish, specially on the internet, because some other person will probably think that since so many people are publishing their lines back to fictious persons like Ragnar Lodbrok, the lines back to them have to be correct. Which they most often are not.

Think back to when you all got the email from Geni.com telling you that you were related to Ragnar Lodbrok. What was your first thoughts and feelings? Were you maybe a bit elated? And then you found the discussions and wrote that you were related. But did you all read the curatornote or the start of the About me section where it says that Ragnar is not a historical person, but a mythical one. And what is the likelihood of any of us being related to a mythical person, and what is the likelihood that we are able to prove it, which is what we need to do to get our familytrees correct, because we all want a correct tree, don't we? The answer to these questions are really pretty easy, the answer is: No, we are not related to this mythical person, No, we are not ever going to be able to prove a relationship back to Ragnar Lodbrok, and Yes, we want a correct tree.

So, therefore there are no need to publish a relationship to Ragnar because he is not a real person and he has probably never existed. He is fictious.

I think it is sad that Geni.com is sending out emails telling users on Geni that they are related to persons like Ragnar Lodbrok, because it isn't true. I didn't know Geni.com had such a practice. And I wish they would stop sending out such emails telling users on Geni that they are related to persons living so far back in time when it is not possible to prove a relationship back to them. Those emails are deceiving users to think that it is a correct relationship since it sort of is "stamped" by the quality of Geni.com and to me it makes the company look bad, it makes us curators look bad, and the users get frustrated when they learn that the relationship sent to them by Geni.com isn't correct.

Yes, we want a correct tree, and even it would be much work we could try to cut the incorrect paths one by one. In this specific case (I share the same path as Donna), is Tjøstolv Gunnarsson Holck the person we should remove the parents from, Remi?

Appearently (I haven't read the source myself), there is an article in NST VII or VIII that states that he is the oldest known person in the Holch-family.

I believe the cut off here was Black Death date too? He is on my line as well.

Ruben, start a new discussion about Tjostolv and let us see what it leads to.

In addition to Ragnar being my 31st great grandfather, I just found out that Konge Harald Halfdansson (king Harald Fairhair), first king of Norway is my 29th great grandfather. I am taking a tour of Scandinavia on my Harley Davidson next month.

I have to settle with a clip, jealous but not grudging.
https://youtu.be/SVU2KGAOUoA

Logbook was reportedly a nick name because of some britches his wife made for him out of animal hair. In German Loden is felt, also made of hair. I am assuming that Brok is an old version of britches, this the name hairy britches (Lodbrok).

Ragnar "Lodbrok" Sigurdsson is your 40th great grandfather.

Your path is, like all other paths back to Ragnar Lodbrok, a little problematic. In your case it is too many generations. See this discussion: https://www.geni.com/discussions/149168

I can't believe that this thread has been over 4 years active!

Remi, why don't someone take Ragnar's profile out from Geni?

Jani, there's no consensus to take him out.

There's consensus that incorrect lines need cutting. There's no consensus that the saga-only profiles should be removed entirely. I, for one, think they should stay as documented.

What needs to be cut is the link between proven certain profiles and the saga profiles. The problem is trying to identify where facts (proven certain) change to fiction (saga).

There shouldn't be any problem having saga-only profiles on Geni as long as their not connected to any living persons.

There is an added dimension that the sagas are not uniform in structure.

There are two saga's dedicated to Ragnar and his sons but the two of them (in the versions we have existing today) do not match each other, so for of a sample set of just two we already have a 100% fail rate.

For anyone who is not aware, the current Geni profile for Ragnar is an amalgam of both sagas AND several other sources, so the profile is not "right" compared to anything at all.

> the profile is not "right" compared to anything at all.

Agreed. Perhaps it's time to re-visit this problem and see if we can find some kind of resolution to the battles we've had around it.

It seems a shame. One of the most popular medieval characters in a generation and our collective response on Geni has been to present fiction.

Anne's multiple Arthurs have me intrigued but "one profile each person" is about as close as i come to being religious so the idea of not just multiple profiles but multiple trees has me chasing my own tail like a 3 legged dog (very wobbly)

The Arthur trees work because since, if he ever actually existed, we have no reliable evidence as to when and where, there isn't a "real" profile for him in the World Tree.

The closest we get are the Welsh genes that attach him to the early Welsh tree. Once we discount those as being invented later for the express purpose of both making him "real" AND showing that important Welsh people were descended from him, then the game is up.

And the literary lines are quite clear, for the most part. So it is actually fairly easy --in my terms -- to untangle the lines. In Arthur's case, it was making me quite nuts, to have one Arthur. Because then the branches become impossible. And the arguments silly. There is no point to arguing as to whether or not Arthur had a son by his half sister, when he did in some versions of the story, he didn't in other versions, and he WASN'T THERE to begin with.

So we now have several Arthur's, each with their own label as to the text they came from, and each with their own horde of fictional characters attached.

I think that this model would indeed work well for the saga folk.

I too, my dear Alex Moes, am deeply invested in the one profile per person model.

To keep the long attached fictitious people, but to give them clarity as to where they come from and how they affect the early branches of the tree -- that helps a grape at deal, I think.

In the case of Arthur, it doesn't make sense to have one profile for him. If he had existed, we could argue the evidence. But what we have are a multitude of various Arthur's, as they were interpreted by various authors. Is that what is going on with Ragnar?

Oh, and as a footnote -- once the Arthur trees got established, it became much easier to deal with the old and new duplicates. Because when users create them, they always have a source. And though usually it's a Mallory clone, sometimes it's mysterious! And important! With really old time names! In which case it's a version, usually, of the Old Welsh. But t is easy to figure out what to do with them. Because they have a provenance.

That's exactly what's going on with Ragnar.

Like Arthur, it's not clear whether Ragnar was a real person. Most experts think not. He is a literary creation. Probably a combination of different men who have attracted a body of legend that was originally attached to other people. Exactly like Arthur.

If there is a real core to Ragnar, he was probably the father of the leaders of the Great Heathen Army. And that's as far as we go if we want to be intellectually honest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Heathen_Army

http://www.scangen.se/medieval/ragnar.htm is on my reading list because I am told I am descended from Ivar, who was a real person, (see A History of the Vikings by Gwyn Jones) whether son of Ragnar or not. Separately, descended from Rollo and Poppa. But Rollo was allegedly born 20 years after the fictitious Ragnar allegedly died, so no connection between the two! I am very dubious of all these trails, especially on geni, which has few rules and many over-enthusiastic folks who only copy internet articles, but rarely have primary resources. I have 4% Norwegian DNA from my British ancestors. Always wondered where it came from. Now I know? Maybe.

How many of you (Us) have Ragnar "Lodbrok" Sigurdsson in more than one line.

FWIW, 4% corresponds to a single pure-blood Norwegian ancestor 5 generations back - so he/she should be your great-great-great-grandparent, approximately 150 years back.

More likely is that you inherit snippets of DNA classified as "Norwegian" from several different great-great-great-grandparents. But you won't need to reach back to the Vikings to explain this fraction.

The "ethnicity" estimates are a guessing game anyway. No two companies ever gave the same ethnicity result on a test.

Gary Wayne Wells the answer is "none" since noone can prove any line back to Ragnar at the moment. And all the lines from a living person on Geni back to Ragnar are totally nonsense since there are no proof of any line back to this saga figure.

Strange how there is no talk of checking dna with the use of gedmatch now available,i believe I am related by means of John de Dutton of Cheshire uk

Ian, DNA can't help with something this far back. Autosomal DNA begins to fade after about 5 generations and has usually disappeared by about 9 or 10 generations.

To do DNA analysis you need fairly long segments (> 5 cM). Because the DNA breaks up segments and recombines each generation, no one alive today would have long enough segments for analysis.

Ragnar "Lodbrok" Sigurdsson is your 38th great grandfather