Grandma’s Tale and the Domesday Book

From a very young age, us kids were steeped in many of our grandmother’s rich stories, especially those that hinted of our English ties to ancient heraldry. Grandma Candy, as we called her, was from my mother’s side, and relished recounting the boundless tales of our supposed heralded bloodline. Firmly resolved, she never swayed in her belief that our lineage traced back to actual English royalty.

My mother, having been exposed to these tales growing up, remained skeptical. If they truly descended from royalty, then why wasn’t she allowed to wear a tiara? Despite the family strangely faring relatively well during the Depression, she often pondered why the true wealth associated with royalty never followed them to America.

Mother was always dubious but allowed Grandma Candy her time to stir the inquisitive nest with the children. After leaving our grandmother, my mother was left to fend off the barrage of questions we likely had. She would pretend to listen and when she had enough, she would roll her eyes and quip a snarled response like, “If it is true, I can’t understand why we didn’t participate in polo matches or fox hunts.”

We would all roll our eyes back in disgust and mutter, “Seriously? It’s because we are not there! They only do that… in England.”

Grandma Candy always had a gift in telling, what I would call, voluptuous stories. But the tales of our English heritage always had that veil of authenticity. If we were at her house, she would occasionally open her safe and allow us to view, but never touch, the “Kingsley book”.

Always wearing white gloves, she would carefully turn the weathered pages that marked all the names and dates of prior Kingsley’s and their children. Going back as far as 1403, it was a keepsake passed down through generations and always to the eldest son, if at all possible. Since grandmother was an only child, the book now rested in her sole possession.

As David had come to find out, the earliest record of my mother’s family name appeared in the “Domesday Book,” also known as the ‘Day of Judgment.’ Consequently, it became known as ‘The King’s Book‘ or the ‘Great Book of Winchester,’ aptly named because of its location in Winchester. This book and its historical relevance in British history is unparallel.