Curious, what exactly happened to the Roman Censuses?

[john_dominic]

Just to satisfy my curiousity, since I can't find anything through a direct internet search, and I have no idea to start on with a library.

Were they lost? Burnt in a raid? Are some remaining?

It would have been amazing to have them, considering their records included their surnames, parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents and they took the censuses every 14 years - making us be able to trace our families back 2000 years, even further than the Swedes.

Anyway, I imagine we would have heard people tracing their families back to 100BC or whatever if they existed (so obviously, they don't), but i'm just curious on exactly what happened to them.

[MauroMags]

If they still exist, I think it would be difficult to connect many of the Roman records even to the dark ages since many aspects of society degraded quickly.

There are many accounts of wealthy farming families becoming serfs (within a generation) because of dire economic trends, invasions or other calamities. In some of those cases, their descendants lost the original family name and adopted that of their lords. Some Italian cities have a hard time justifiably indentifying themselves as Roman, Etruscan or Greek never mind specific families.

However, im sure several noble lineages have been thoroughly documented. If anyone has one Please send it over! I would love to see a family tree that connects the Roman era to the modern day

[JamesBianco]

The problem is that there are not connecting periods of time where records were kept. Even in the case of Royalty it is highly speculative to connect what is documented (circa 600 AD) back into the time period necessary to utilize the Roman records.

There have been countless attempts to do this of course, but then again books have been published "tracing" the Carolingian kings to Roman Senators. Usually the primary source material is an oral history originating in the medieval period. I do not consider that of genealogical value.

Jim