For some time I have had a box here that was sent to me by “ P ” from New Zealand. It arrived while the family-tree project was already expanding in several directions, and there always seemed to be something more immediate demanding attention: another archive to search, another document to process, another email to answer, another branch of the family suddenly producing new information. Today I finally had enough time to sit down, open the box properly and begin looking through what was inside. I was expecting family material, of course, but I was not quite prepared for what I found. Among the contents is a set of old handwritten sheets containing names, relationships and dates from the family tree. As I carefully worked my way through what I could decipher, the chronology kept moving backwards: through the nineteenth century, then the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, until eventually I found information apparently reaching all the way back to 1546 . That is an extraordin...