reverie, aspiration

"An old family" is one of those expressions that, when you think about it literally, you go, "Huh?" -- because how could anyone's family really be any "older" than anyone else's family? Every person comes from someone, who came from someone else, & so on back to whatever. (Or Whatever.)

It isn't as if some people's grandparents or great-grandparents just suddenly sprang out from cliff-edge rocks, or emerged, gnome-light, from under mushrooms. Everyone traces back to some place, and someone.

But "old family" refers to a family which can trace its history back to something good. Or big. Or outstanding. Or (better yet, and) -- rich.

(If a person's ancestors traced back to something bad, then it would be like -- uh, ours is not an "old" family, we're part of that mushroom-crowd....Umh-yes, that's it, that's how it was. ...Um. Um-hmh. Change the subject....)

In America some families say they can trace their ancestors "back to the Mayflower." Others trace back to England in the 1500s or 1400s, whatever....

In Europe, they can go back further -- they would say, back to the Mayflower? Oh, you mean like, last week??
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When I read about Diana, Princess of Wales
and about Jacqueline Kennedy,
I noted that both of these icons / role models came from families where there was a type of ancestor / lineage Thing happening.

Jackie's was the Bouviers -- proud of their ancestors in the French aristocracy, and for Diana, it was Spencers on her father's side and Fermoys on her mother's.

Something I saw was that Diana Spencer's parents and grandparents didn't give her and her sisters and brother much information about their family heritage. It was just there. Part of the reason for that was, the Spencers split up when Diana was a small child: tension and trauma in the parents' relationship kept them busy at the adult level.

--------- {excerpt, The Diana Chronicles} -- Her father's inheritance of his earldom in June 1975 meant that the ordinary girl became Lady Diana Spencer and the resident of a stately home. (Her sisters became Lady Sarah and Lady Jane. Her brother, Charles, inherited the title of Viscount Althorp of Great Brington.) The morning Diana heard the news, she rushed along the corridor at West Heath with her dressing gown billowing out behind her, saying, "I'M A LADY! I'm Lady Diana now!"

...Being a Spencer, more perhaps than being a princess and more than being a global celebrity, was a formative factor of Diana's life. Althorp was a place of romantic aspiration. You leave the twenty-first century as soon as you pass from the encroaching suburbia of Great Brington village and turn into the long, tree-lined avenue to the great house. There is an immediate sense of pastoral harmony. Even the sheep are dotted through the park with pleasing asymmetry, like the reverie from a Regency window.

Diana's life had been afflicted with the chaos and impermanence of modern social mores, but in every treasure-crammed room of the Spencer family seat, she inhaled the hierarchical values of the past. Because of Johnnie Spencer's war with his father, the children rarely visited the big house as a family when the old Earl was alive.

Growing up they knew almost nothing about their heritage -- about the history of the treasures on display at Althorp, the books that were the glory iof its library, the spectacular pictures that were leaning from its walls in their chains.

"I didn't even know I had any kind of title until I started getting these letters saying 'The Honorable Charles Spencer,'" Diana's brother has recalled.
{end Excerpt}

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One of the points made when Lady Diana became engaged to the Prince of Wales in 1981 was that her family was older than his. (When that marriage began to go wrong, publicly, my father commented casually, "It's too bad she had to marry down.")

{excerpt, The Diana Chronicles} As Viscount Althorp [Diana's father], eldest son of the seventh Earl, he was the presumptive heir to Althorp House, a 121-room stately home with 14,000 acres of rolling Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, and Norfolk farmland, complete with cottages, farms, and villages. The family was older by 250 years than that Hanoverian import of the eighteenth century, King George I, whose descendants are today's House of Windsor.

The Spencers could trace themselves back to 1469, when they were a respected clan of prospering sheep farmers in Warwickshire, already in a position to lend money to the monarchy. In 1603, James I repaid the royal debts with...a barony, conferred on the prosperous Robert Spencer, which forty years later included the earldom of Sunderland.

...The Spencers' glory days were the eighteenth century. They became powerful forces in the Whig party, dedicated to restraining the power of the monarchy and supporters of the Protestant succession; in the nineteenth century, they became Parliamentary Liberals, rivals to the Tories. They were behind-the-scenes power brokers. They helped smooth the ascension to the throne of the Hanoverian prince who became King George I.
---------- {end Excerpt}.
{The Diana Chronicles, Tina Brown,
2007, Random House}

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