The genealogy web—that is, sites like Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, MyHeritage.com—mentions a “Euphemie de Savoie,” supposed “illegitimate daughter of Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy.” According to Ancestry.com, she was born on the 10th of October, 1560, in Anjou, France. Euphemie is linked in marriage to my tenth great-grandfather, Pierre Le Roy. They had three children1 (or maybe five)2 and she died on November 19, 1642, in the same place where she was born. The FamilySearch.org data for Euphemie and Pierre is even more messy (and ridiculous) than the Ancestry.com data. This whole specimen of ancestral digging is so typical of the genealogy web. People who use these websites tend to mindlessly add names, and they click “leaf” hints and merge records without observing the simplest details. It frustrates those of us who appreciate accuracy to no end, but it is what it is, right?
I found a book about illegitimate children in the House of Savoy: https://books.openedition.org/irhis/1215?lang=en: Bastards as Clients: the House of Savoy and its illegitimate children, translated to English by Robert Oresko.3 According to this book, Emmanuel Philibert had ten illegitimate children.4 (If the Euphemie story is accurate, then that number must be eleven.) He was married to Margaret of Valois, Duchess of Berry, the person that familysearch.org mistakes for my ancestor, thus the sister site RelativeFinder.org registering me as a cousin of Britain’s Prince Philip. (Some hasty user at familysearch.org decided to attach Margaret as Eupemie’s mother. Tsk tsk! Thus, the assumption @ relativefinder.org that Philip and I are 14th cousins! We are not, and we cannot be, since Philip was descended from Margaret, and if I am descended from Emmanuel Philibert at all, it must be by way of an untold mistress.)
Who might this mistress be? The aforementioned book mentions ten illegitimate children with six mistresses.5 Here’s how it breaks down:6
Rosa Maria di Savoia, born 1556, to a woman called Laura Crevola, and married in 1570 to Filippo I d’Este, Marchese7 di San Martino.
Euphemie de Savoie8 was born in 1560. The book mentions that one of the illegitimate children was born in 1560, and since our notes about Euphemie from Ancestry indicate that she was born in that year, I’m assuming (bear with me9) that Euphemie is the 1560 child unnamed in the Oresko book.
Amedeo di Savoia, born 1561 or 1562, son of Lucrezia Proba
Maurizio, also son of Lucrezia, born April 1610
Margherita, Lucrezia’s daughter, birth year unlisted
Piero Luigi Roero, born in 1574, the same year in which Emmanuel Philibert’s wife died…. Piero’s mother, Suzanne de Beaumont, was married by convenience to a family of the name of Roero, in Roero, Piedmont, and the boy was raised as a member of that family.
Beatrice di Savoia, daughter of Beatrice de Langosco
Ottone di Savoia, same mother as Beatrice
Matilda di Savoia, daughter of the same, and married in 1605 to Charles de Simiane, Seigneur d'Albigny
Filippo, son of a daughter of Martino Doria (died 1599, killed in a duel with the Duke de Créqui)
Giacomo, abbate of Santa Maria di Pinerolo
Of course, Euphemie might have never existed, or the person who married Pierre Le Roy might have had a totally different name and provenance. For all we know, “Euphemie” (if she even existed) had no connection to the House of Savoy whatsoever. A person existed who married into the Roy family and had descendants who eventually produced me. (My great-grandmother was born a Roy.) My own book, The Ira David Schneider Family,10 only traces our Roy line back as far as Nicolas Le Roy (1639-1690). Nicolas was the Roy who left France to settle in La Durantaye, Bellechasse, Québéc. His parents were most certainly Louis Le Roy and the former Anne LeMaitre.11 His grandfather was almost certainly Pierre Le Roy. Yet it is far from certain that Pierre’s wife was called Euphemie de Savoie, even less that this person was an illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Savoy.
MyHeritage.com has several entries about a Euphemie Savoie, sometimes inserting a “de” and sometimes not. The only one with dates that match up is for “Euphémie Roy de Moulay12 (born Savoie)”. It records that her parents were Joseph Savoie and Lucille, née Bourque. It also records that her husband was Pierre and that they had five children. Ancestry.com has matches for Joseph Savoie (1540-1599) and spouse Lucille Bourque (1542-1620). “Marie Euphemie Savoie” (1575-1654) is among their children.
There may well be a royal bastard or two in one of my lineages. The name Roy too, as well as Savoy, could have royal origin. ROY is close enough to the French word for king—ROI. (Nicolas Le Roy, in fact, as I mention in my book, is often erroneously assigned the title of “Seigneur.”) Everyone craves a little bit of the pixie dust of royalty. If we can’t be heirs to the throne of Genovia—Princess Diaries reference here, in case you’re not a reader of Meg Cabot—we might dream at least of having a fairy godmother with a talent for transfiguration. No? All right, then, content yourself with the purchase of a Scottish Clan title, and on stormy days when the WiFi isn’t working, reread Pride and Prejudice. Hey, when the historical data is missing and the family-tree metaphorical weeds are overgrown, just take a deep breath. A colleague of mine likes to joke, “They knew we’d be looking for it, so they made it difficult to find.” Of course, the truth is, they were too busy washing clothes in the river, making fires to cook food, having babies, and fighting wars for kings, to bother documenting stuff for our DOT COM family trees. I’m ok with pretending Joseph Savoie existed, and that he fathered Euphemie, and that, being fed up with her chores, she made up a story about being the Duke of Savoy’s long lost daughter.
RelativeFinder Dot Org! Go there. Check it out. If you already have a FamilySearch account, click on “sign in with familysearch.org” and find out who your famous relatives are. According to their faulty algorithms, I’m kin to everyone from Bloody Queen Mary to Princess Diana. I’m also related, it says, to Elvis Presley, George Washington, Barack Obama, Tom Hanks, and Tom Cruise. Who am I not related to? That is probably a more useful question. When the weeds are impossible, sometimes the best recourse is the process of elimination.
NOTES
Ancestry.com claims five children, but two of those are obviously duplicated.
MyHeritage.com and FamilySearch.org entries differ from the ones at Ancestry.com and they are all more or less (probably less) reliable.
This is an Open Access translation in English by Robert Oresko. For more information, see the WorldCat listing: https://www.worldcat.org/title/34723155. It is available at several academic libraries in French, Italian, English, and Spanish.
By his wife, Margaret of Valois, Duchess of Berry, he did have one legitimate offspring, his son and heir, Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy.
Oresko breaks it down in “Appendix II: Illegitimate Issues of the House of Savoy (16th-18th Centuries).”
My addition is Point #2. Everything else in this list is from Oresko’s Appendix II. See Note 4.
Marchese is just Italian for Marquis, or Marquess, a title of nobility that ranks below a duke and above a count/earl. (Earl is just the British version of a count.)
The various spellings of Savoy indicate where this person was born and lived. Rosa, living somewhere Italian, was named di Savoia, but Euphenie was apparently a French girl, thus her name was spelled differently.
Investigations yet to be concluded may prove something else to be the case, but bear with me for the moment.
Ira David Schneider was my father. The book is small. It is published in paperback as well as ebook (kindle) form: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NRZM13P. It outlines the broad strokes of our lineages; my goal was to give the broad strokes and not be overwhelming, and my intended audience is anyone who shares any of these lineages. Description from Amazon: “The ancestry of Ira David Schneider is published here. His ancestry involves many of the core Colonial and Acadian families of Louisiana, as well as an orphan train rider whose biological mother was an Ellis Island immigrant from Upper Austria. The book will be of interest to the genealogist concerned with Avoyelles Parish families. Some of the names in David's ancestry are as follows: Coco, Roy, Cailleteau, Broutin, Bordelon, Marcotte, Normand, Moncla, Rabalais, Gaspard.... The research relates to the Instagram feed @iradavidontheweb, an account managed by David's daughter. In the epilogue, there is poetry by David's mother, Louise Coco Schneider: four poems.”
I know that the records on familysearch.org in regards to these particular identities are A ROYAL HOT MESS. I trust the late (my cousin) Sheldon Roy’s website more, because Sheldon was consistently precise and thorough in his research. His website (mylouisianafamily.com) is closed to non-subscribers, and since his decease in 2018 at the age of 64, I’m not sure if that website is able to take anymore subscribers. Thankfully, my logon still works and I am able to check the extensive genealogical information that lives there. Accordingly, Nicholas was certainly the son of Louis and Anne Le Roy; and he was the grandson of Pierre Le Roy; however, there is no mention of “Euphemie de Savoie”. It’s an ancestral dead end.
Her husband, Pierre, is often listed as Pierre de Maulay le Roy. It’s possible that Maulay refers to his provenance, while the name of Roy (obviously) refers to his father’s surname: i.e. Pierre of Maulay, the Roy. There is a historically notable person called Peter de Maulay, a crusader and “evil counsellor” of King John of England. Hence, another potential digging-for-pixie-dust rabbit hole.