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DM article - family myth

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  • DM article - family myth

    Interesting article in today's Daily Mail - "I'm not who I thought I was" - family myth proved wrong.

    AMANDA PLATELL: All families have their own narrative about who they are and where they came from, told from one generation to the next.


    Carol

  • #2
    Ha! The old aunt got it right after all!
    Anne

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    • #3
      Very good article. Enjoyed reading that. Never underestimate your old aunties :D

      Comment


      • #4
        Yes interesting - but it's a typical Daily Mail beat-up, I'm afraid! I am descended from the same family as Amanda Platell (we share the same surname and in fact we are 3rd cousins). As the article does say, Amanda's aunt Charmian researched the family back in the nineties and made the Germany connection back then. Her research was well documented and I think never in doubt, and following the publishing of her book in 1996 many other Platell descendants, including myself, added the ancestry to their family trees on Ancestry.com and other websites. So it seems that Amanda's friend has looked on Ancestry.com, seen the trees going back to Petrus Otto Platell in Germany and determined that this proves that Amanda's aunt Charmian was right all along - seemingly unaware that her research was the basis for the information being on Ancestry in the first place! So if it's not a beat-up, it is certainly somewhat circular reasoning!

        With regards to the purported Huguenot connection, that was always pure speculation with no supporting documentary evidence. There was a Huguenot family in England by the name of Platel who were indeed descended from a French silversmith, but there is nothing to suggest that they are linked in any way to our family. Probably a connection was made due to the similarity of the names and the fact that there were virtually no other families in the UK with the same name. But, as it turns out, our Platells arrived in England 150 years later than Pierre Platel the Huguenot silversmith! Moreover, with the benefit of another 20 years of digitised records becoming available since Charmian wrote her book, I have managed to trace our Platells back to the birth of Petrus Otto's father, Jacobus: he was born in Maastricht, Netherlands and was baptised in the Catholic church there - so not very likely to have been a Protestant Huguenot then!! No doubt he became a Lutheran as a matter of convenience when he emigrated from Maastricht to Hanover some time during the Napoleonic wars. In fact, there is a Platell family in the Netherlands who are almost certainly related to Jacobus and they are still Catholics to this day.

        Incidentally, all of the photos, and much of the content, of the Daily Mail article are lifted straight out of Charmian's book.

        Richard
        Last edited by Richard in Perth; 12-12-19, 15:12.

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