Anecdote...

Isabella Stewart of New York never thought much about ancestry until she married into the Gardner family of Boston. In Boston, she endured a good deal of fairly dull conversation on the subject, so, eventually, she had her Stewart descent traced directly back —all the way to King Fergus I of Scotland, a contemporary of Alexander the Great! ... After having the Stewart lineage engrossed and illuminated in colors on a long scroll, Isabella Stewart Gardner was in a position to make one of her famous, much-quoted remarks. She had listened to a monologue by a Boston dowager concerning that lady's American Revolutionary ancestry. "Ah yes," said Isabella. "They were much less careful about immigration in those days, I believe."