Concestor MEBURN

Abt 1438 -

• Name	Concestor MEBURN
  Born	Abt 1438
  Gender	Male
  Person ID	I4106	Mewburn
  Last Modified	9 Mar 2024

  
  

  Children	1. Progenitor MEWBURN,   b. Abt 1463, Yorkshire, England  [natural]   2. Progenitor MEABURN,   b. Abt 1480, Durham, England  [natural]
  Last Modified	9 Mar 2024
  Family ID	F210	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

• Notes

  Concestor is a term used by Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor's Tale, his heroic journey through all of our evolution. It is intended to mean a common ancestor. Here it is also used in that sense, but is really no more than a technical device, a mechanism that provides a single point, a dummy record, from which to hang all the strands of Mewburns and Meaburns. I am not arguing that there is necessarily a single person from whom all Mewburns and Meaburns are descended. It is perfectly possible that the name was adopted on several occasions - only a thorough DNA study would help to resolve that point. I have then found it convenient to group lines of Meaburns separately from Mewburns. I do not suggest that they are necessarily and genetically separate, just that they appear to be distinct within the timeframe for which records are available. That is not to say that there is not some overlap in the way that the names are used and allocated. There is an example where a line of Meburnes in Durham became firmly Mewburn after moving to Yorkshire. There are several cases where a variety of spellings has been used even within the same set of siblings. Nothing can be relied on from early spellings. What is clear is that Mewburn is fairly firmly the Yorkshire spelling while Meaburn is County Durham. The lines or branches that are identified subsequently may not all be independent. Their separate existence may just mean that I have yet to find a way of linking them through some common ancestor. The Concestor has been given a 'birth' date. It means little. I have simply moved back 25 years as a notional generational gap each time I've created a dummy record. If there was a real concestor he might easily have been born much earlier. There are also a few people that have yet to find their way into any line - there are records for them but I have not found parentage or other ways of linking them and have not created additional mini-branches for them. These people are not in this tree and are not in FTM. They do however exist in the large Excel database that is maintained within the Mewburn study and that covers known Mewburn/Meaburn births and a summary of vital events for each of the people identified.