[.ca] Royalty for Commoners: The Completer Known Lineage of ... (ISBN 080631687X)

Remarkably bad genealogy:
In my title I almost said "remarkably bad genealogical scholarship," but anyone familiar with the previous editions of this book will recognise that it would be inaccurate to associate the word "scholarship" with this book. All of the serious flaws present in the earlier editions remain in this book: rampant spelling and transcription errors, erroneous and misleading bibliographical entries, and the presentation of purely conjectural genealogical theories as though they were a part of "the complete known ancestry of John of Gaunt." These kinds of embarassing errors are found repeatedly on every single page of this book. Due to the great amount of inaccuracy and genealogical nonsense, anyone seriously interested in royal medieval genealogy would do well to steer clear of this book.

Full of mistakes and a lot of lines not reliable:
This book must be avoided! It is full of mistakes, some big mistakes that could let you dream about some ancestors who are not in fact. Biggest errors are for example Makhir/Theuderic and Zaida cases. The bibliography is bad, it looks like he added works he never saw! Don't waste your money with this book! This is bad genealogy and you cannot be sure of anything from this book.

Don't waste your money:
This book has reasonably valid information in it (checked against more reliable sources), but the author makes no attempt to differentiate the reliable from the unreliable, and far too much of it is unreliable. I suspect the author doesn't even keep his database in a computer genealogical program because there are many internal inconsistencies (I'm my own grandpa kinds of inconsistencies) that all the respectable genealogical software would catch.

Avoid this book:
No genealogical researcher should touch this book. All editions have been riddled with errors, and the latest is no exception. The spellings are frequently wrong, the lines are often inaccurate, mythical lines are not distinguished from historical ones, highly conjectural lines are not distinguished from proven ones, and most of the books and articles associated with many of the lines are completely unrelated to the material they allegedly cover. No statement in the book can be trusted at face value. Even if you want to use it just as a finding aid, double check everything. Chris Bennett

A great bargain:
This book is a great bargain for anyone interested in early and middle medieval history and genealogy. Accumulating this data by acquiring other books would cost at least 10 times as much. A caution: legendary, mythical and even fictional lineages are mixed in with the historical lineages, so care should be taken when using the book. Applicable references are given with most of the lineages, so the list of references can be checked for the known scholarly sources (Schwennicke etc), especially on anything before AD 1000. There are also silly errors (I'm my own grandpa type stuff), but most can be spotted by careful reading.