Word: ancestors
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...year 1839, the Orleans "Citizen King," Louis Philippe, anxious to curry favor with his nation's snootier aristocrats, who generally held a low opinion of him, offered to display the armorial bearings of anyone able to provide proof of an ancestor who had fought in the Crusades. Within a year Versailles was overflowing with applicants, all of whom bore ancient documents to attest their claims...
...while she was lying flat on the turf after a riding spill. Timid, pale and thin, she was shortly installed as the duke's mistress in a mansion in St. James Square. A model of discreet industrious domesticity, she bore him several bastards, one of whom was ancestor of the illustrious Spanish Dukes of Alba. Helped by Arabella's prestige, her brothers did well too: George became a very unpopular admiral, while Charles became a fairly decent general. But John-who had already got his start in that affair with Barbara-was to outstrip them...
Britain's Earl of Sandwich, 81. whose noble ancestor, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, is credited with inventing the sandwich in the 18th century, accepted an award from the U.S.'s National Pickle Packers Association in recognition of the service that the sandwich has rendered to the consumption of pickles...
...only human, after all. Last week, determined to clear up the matter of the nation's divine origins, a band of 30 jeep-riding scientists swarmed around the mountain peak of Takachiho on the island of Kyushu, where, according to legend. Ho-wori-no-mikoto, the heavenly ancestor of emperors, came to earth...
...Bavaria, the locals of Mindelheim hopefully awaited a visit from their greatest living hereditary "prince." His better-known name: Sir Winston Churchill. The Mindelheimers reckoned that Sir Winston, a sixth-generation grandson of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, was a liege lord of theirs through his descent from that ancestor, who was paid off in 1705 with the principality of Mindelheim for military aid to the Holy Roman Empire. In Britain, however, killjoy scholars stuffily pointed out that Sir Winston is merely a collateral descendant of the great Marlborough-and that only eight years after the princedom† was established...