What were our ancestors' names 1,000 years ago?

What were the names of ancestors who lived 1,000 years ago? Few genealogists are able to document a lineage going back that far. The paper trail gives out on almost all lines well before then. DNA evidence can sometimes point to individuals on Y lines, but rarely do they have a known name (such as the founder of the Little Scottish Cluster, an unnamed man who lived in Scotland about 1,200 years ago).

Even if we can’t establish genealogical connections, we do know some of the names from that era. An academic database called the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE) provides a biographical register of more than 30,000 Anglo-Saxons living in England and parts of Wales from 597 to 1042, including names, locations, and other context. Here’s an example:

The number 4 after the name points to a limitation of the historical records: Anglo-Saxons did not use surnames. To differentiate people sharing the same name, numbers are appended:

Prosopography tries to explain how individuals are related to larger groupings in society. Historians working on PASE employ various sources to document these connections: charters, inscriptions, coins, and the Domesday Book, the massive land and tax survey commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085.

PASE includes geographic markers for people listed in the Domesday book, such as Tholf 2, or “Tholf the Dane,” a significant landowner in the west country:

The 30,000 individuals listed in PASE tend to be kings, lords, landowners, bishops, and scribes - the elites of Anglo-Saxon society. Millions of women, peasants, townfolk, and others are not included, either because their names were never written down, or the historical records have been lost. The same lack of records makes it nearly impossible to connect the names we do know to their descendants today.

PASE is not the only large-scale project to document the people from earlier periods of history. The 10 Million Names project aims to recover the names of the 10 million people enslaved in America (see our video about this). The China Biographical Database Project has documented 641,568 people living in China from the 7th through 19th centuries.