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Pearsall Surname Project
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Surname
History and Genealogy
of the Pearsall Family in England
and America:
Volume I
Front Cover
Inside Front Cover
The Motive
Thanks
Illustrations
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Appendix I
Volume II
Volume III
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and Aaron. It has
long been mooted as to the exact time when Odin arrived in Sweden, and,
with no desire to enter into this controversy we shall in this genealogy
for the sake of comparison, assume the general accuracy of the genealogy
of the Kings of Denmark as they are set out in the saga of Saxo Grammaticus. If the reader will turn to chapter
eleven and section three of this family history, and read the Chronicles
of the kingdom of Bernicia, as therein presented, he will see
that the reign of king Harald of Denmark
exactly coincides with that of the Roman Emperor Severus, who died in York in the year A.
D. 211. The Danish genealogy gives twenty-seven generations as preceding
King Harald until we come to his ancestor King Hadding, in whose reign Saxo
says the Danish records show that Odin appeared in Sweden.
This brings the time to circa B. C. 543. We are not, however, unaware
that the acceptance of this date does not entirely satisfy the data
appearing in this family history, in the Yngling
saga as it gives twenty-nine generations from Rognvald
to Odin, whereas the Danish genealogy would make it fifty-three. There
being in the genealogy of the Bernician kings
in the said chapter, section three, fifteen generations from Egbert, the
contemporary of Rognvald, to Eoppa who was the
contemporary of King Ragner of Den-mark, and
thirty-eight from the latter to Hadding the
contemporary in Den-mark of Odin in Sweden. We shall revert to this again
in the presentation of the Yngling saga. Nor
should this date, so far beyond the Christian era, deter the reader from
accepting Saxo's pedigree of the Danish kings
as chronologically fixing the time of the early arrival of the Scythians
on the coasts of Scandia. For Aristotle,
who lived B. C. 340, describes Britain accurately in his works and it is
well known that the Cymri who settled that
island were emigrants from Scandia. In the Introduction to the History of
England by C. R. L. Fletcher (page 14) it is stated, as an accepted fact,
that one Pytheas, a Greek merchant, in B. C.
350, sailed from Marseilles through the
Straits of Gibraltar to Britain,
Denmark and Norway, and that going and coming he spent
considerable time in Britain.
But in any
system of genealogy depending upon oral transmission, the dynasties of
short duration and without important incidents would soon drop out of
mind, particularly where they were not kings but earls, and in the lapse
of time, in this case thirteen centuries, the earls, father, son and even
grandson, all having the same name, would be recalled as one person of
the given name. For example the use of the word pharaoh in the Bible; and
likewise Moses, who, in compiling from the Sagas of his day, the History
of the World from the time of its creation, speaks of Nimrod, who began
to be a mighty man before the Lord, and then he gives the bounds of his
kingdom. According to the usual reading of this part of Genesis this was
a single individual, whereas recent investigations have shown that this
one name represents a dynasty of many generations, ruling over a kingdom
that came into being, prospered, declined and died the same as other
nations have done since the world began. The truthfulness of the
statement made by Moses is none the less accepted now that we know the
full significance of his reference to this race of Kings. For the same
reason a study of the genealogy of the Kings of Norway, discloses that
the genealogists who compiled the Yngling saga
very wisely divided their work into two parts, namely, that which
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