Its the marriages that make the nations

I've been enjoying doing a fair amount family history work and came across this paragraph in a booklet that is about my Routh line. I have never seen a more carefully documented line by people over the centuries. Here's a family who treasures each other deeply. The man who wrote this was the recipient of many documents that had been preserved and I found his view of the place marriage should have in society refreshing and true. It's really about the quality of marriages, the true quality of love and successful relationships instead of wealth and position, that show how a family fits into society. I loved it.


"Well, I have had my say, and would only add this, that I hope eventually to
compile an index of marriages showing both the names of those families into which
we have married, and of those families which have married into ours through the
centuries. 1 regard this as one of the most interesting featurcs of any family tree: it is
not only by the number of eminent men produced by a familyand we have produced
our fair share of great men, warriors, knights, Crusaders, Bishops and Divines, Chief Justices and Judges, Admirals, Generals and men of Letters and of Sciencenor by its
revenues (which were worth something like half a million pounds sterling per year in
modern currency, in the time of that Elizabeth Routh, ward in Chancery, who in 1500
married Sir John Cutts, Treasurer of the King's Household, carrying with her all the
estates of the main line of the Rouths of Routh) that a family can best be judged; what
gives a truer index to worth than either of these is the marriages it makes; for these
show, over a period, more clearly than wealth, rank, spasmodic outbursts of
brilliancy, or any other single factor, the true worth and position of a family in the
history of a nation."