Word: ancestors
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...called "the Englishman's Bible." Founded in 1826 by John Burke (whose son became Sir Bernard in time for the 17th edition), the book is a kind of Who Was Who that lists more than 150,000 names, and traces each lordly family back to its earliest noble ancestor, thus clearly differentiating survivors of the old, landowning aristocracy from the plebeian parvenus whose titles, created in the past half-century, now represent more than 50% of the peerage...
...Morrison, police constable of Brixton, England." On the other hand, Burke's-which sends the Queen a free copy of the $32.34 book specially bound in her favorite blue goatskin-devotes 45 pages of minute type to the royal family's doings since the days of its ancestor Egbert, King of Wessex (d. 839), who was one of England's first kings and grandfather of Alfred the Great...
Lips That Fail. Most of the men are well over 60, and all are traditional players of the New Orleans style-a rick-a-tick-tick, free-moving jazz form that is the noblest ancestor of Dixieland. The oldest regular is Papa John Joseph, 85, who still plays a mean bass and is a veteran of the old Kid Ory and King Oliver Creole jazz bands. Papa plays in the company of such old regulars as Trumpeter Punch Miller, 68, and Clarinetist George Lewis, 62. Lewis is among the few jazz pioneers still living. The clarinet on which he composed...
Colonel William E. Byrd, the colonial ancestor of Virginia's Senator Harry F. Byrd, named the place the Great Dismal Swamp. After trekking through the muck and mire with a band of hardy surveyors, Byrd emerged bug-bitten almost to death (the Dismal Swamp's yellow fly, they still say, will politely lift a man's hat from his head so as to get a better bite at his ears). The swamp, straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border, just across the James River Bay from Norfolk, was nothing better than a "filthy bogg," he wrote. Even birds...
...Without mentioning what was then the most closely guarded of Gaullist secrets: the fact that his maternal great-great-grandfather was born in Germany. De Gaulle's Teutonic ancestor was Ludwig Phillip Kolb, a barber-surgeon in Napoleon's army, who was born in Grotzingen in 1761 and fell to British bullets at Waterloo...