So Dom's post about Lucy's pedigree got me thinking about Dragon's pedigree... and then I started looking back further... and things happened and I bought a program and got a subscription to AllBreed so I could fix some things that were blatantly wrong, and... well.
I maybe got carried away.
So, if anyone wondered, you can in fact find in Google Books the following:
- The Percheron studbooks, both American and French, up to about 1930
- The Shire studbooks, both American and British, up to about 1940
- The American Hackney studbook up to 1925
They're PDFs! Varying level of scanning quality and scanning completeness (there's a couple missing pages), but... neat and occasionally maddening stuff.
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| I'm gonna break this text up with random pictures. Like Bishop wearing Cessa's fly mask as a hat during our Time of Plague. |
"Maddening?" I hear you ask.
Yes. Dear god, yes. When you get far enough back - for the Shires, it's book 1, for the Percherons I never really found the point where it started - you start running into "by Stallion X, owned by Mr. Y." Or, better yet, "a (some color) stallion owned by Mr. Y." Sooo... are these all the same stallion? Are they all the same Mr. Y? The world may never know. (Well, ok, I'm sure if you dig back into the right primary sources, you can probably figure this out, but... look, I'm working with docs available on Google Books here.)
And that sounds ok, right? Except it's really not. It's not as bad for stallions, but ye gods, the mares. There was a point, when I was deep in Percherons, that I was feeling the deep, deep need to build a time machine and go back to 1700s France exclusively to kick the ass of every Percheron breeder who named a mare Bijou.
"It can't be that - "
Thirty-seven. There are 37 mares named Bijou in Dragon's ancestry. Including one that I could only label as "Bijou dam of Bijou." There are also 2 Bijou IIs. And that is a small fraction of the colossal number of Bijous in the studbooks, a significant number of whom are just referred to as "Bijou owned by Mr. Y."
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| Dragon's grandma |
Honestly, I think every breed may have that name somewhere. I'm pretty sure the one for Hackneys is "Pretender", judging by the number of them I found in Dragon's pedigree.
There's a whole related, deeper rant I could get into here. The sheer number of mares known only as "by Stallion X" across all the breeds I found in these pedigrees is just... shattering. I know some of this is just that things have been lost to time - at least one line of horses I found reference to the stud having burned and taken all the records with it - but no matter how much a friend of mine tried to tell me that this is just... how things were, that it was easier to keep track of the mares because they had fewer foals than the stallions and that they treated the mares like livestock rather than individuals as a matter of course, it feels like a whole bunch of sexist (and maybe classist) bullshit that these mares don't have recorded names. Because you know they had some kind of name, even if it was just to the grooms and stock managers that handled them.
How shattering? Of that 16k name list, just over 2500 mares have no identity beyond who their sire was. Seven others are just "dam of" and a stallion or mare name, and a handful are just "Owner's Name Mare" or "Mare Owned By Owner's Name."
By comparison, I found seven stallions that are just "son of X." Maybe a dozen that are just known by where they came from or their owner's name (like all those "Arabians" in the Thoroughbred lines in the 1700s).
That devaluing of mares carries through in other aspects as well. Take the Shire studbooks. The first few studbooks, the mares didn't have registration numbers. They didn't get registration numbers until twenty years after the stallions.
Just. Nngh. It bothers me, ok?
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| *sigh* Yes. He's a mouthy little shit. And all of Dragon's year-mates let him get away with it, too. Thank god we took off the nuts as soon as we could. |
Speaking of stallions - did you know that apparently all Percherons are descended from a half-Arabian stallion named Jean le Blanc? Had no idea, but there's an article about it here. He also, according to one reference I found, lived to be 32, which is neat.
"Jean-le-Blanc died at the home of his owner M. Miard senior, at the advanced age of thirty-two, free from any defect. It is to this remarkable stallion that we owe, more than to any other, a great improvement of the breed. He was recognized as a true Percheron and nevertheless was a direct descendant of the famous Arab stallion Gallipoly..."
(Witness my Google translation from French. lol)
Another random find: blog post with photo/scan of a 1906 registration with the French Percheron registry.
I do not recommend trying to go into AllBreed and sort out what the ever-living fuck is going on with the Morgans, Saddlebreds, Standardbreds, Tennessee Walkers, and Narragansett Pacers back in the late 1700s and early 1800s. I'm pretty sure spending too much time in there is a verifiable cause of loss of sanity. About the time I realized that two Saddlebreds made a Morgan and two Standardbreds made a Tennessee Walker, I realized that either I could go spend even more time looking up old studbooks, or I could just... take a deep breath and not worry about it, lol.
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| We put our ears up for selfies in this house, young lady! |
"Wait, those are light breeds?" I hear you ask.
Yep! Because of how the Sendera breed was started, and is continuing, there's a bunch of Appaloosa in there, in some places more directly than others (Cessa's mom was an App, for instance). And while I know I at least am guilty of thinking of Appaloosas sometimes as... well... what they've become, the breed as it was incorporated isn't just QHs and Nez Perce stock. There are pure Egyptian Arabians, Morgans, Standardbreds, Thoroughbreds, and assorted draft horses in there, just among my horses' pedigrees; I'm sure there's other breeds out there as well.
As a side note, if AllBreed is at all accurate about early Morgan pedigrees, the level of inbreeding is... terrifying. lol I was thinking QHs were bad (they are), but early Morgans are something else entirely. (Though to be fair, the Percheron stallion Lynnwood Dixiana II is kind of horrifying just by his lonesome. Yes, that's half-siblings for his parents...)
I did get a chuckle out of the Arabians. At a certain point, I started encountering some kind of odd names and ran them through Google Translate. Specifically, I translated A Saqlawi Zubayni and A Saqlawiyah Zubayni, which Google Translate says mean "I polish my customers" and "a Sicilian client," respectively. Now, there's all kinds of variables I can't account for here - including Google Translate being a useless bitch. But I can't help but look at these names and think, "Well, there's a stupid European buyer who didn't know Egyptian involved here, and an Egyptian with a sense of humor..." Like... some of these seem like line items on an invoice, a joke, or outright guesses. lol GT says "A Kuhaylan Umm Surah" is "Is Kahilan or his image?" "A Kuhaylat Ajuz Al-Harqah" is "A burning old man's trick."
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| Number of shits given about rhythm beads: zero. Number of times he tried to eat his lead rope that day: uncounted. |
I recognized two of the Standardbreds! ...Granted, one is a Breyer (Dan Patch) and the other is Marguerite Henry's fault (Hambletonian), but still. lol
The Thoroughbreds, as expected, were something of a trip. They have their own version of AllBreed - turns out that's a thing you can pay for? Who knew. - and it is delightfully comprehensive.
Which is how I know my kids are descended from some of the Reines de Course mares. Also how I realized that I learned slightly more about TB bloodlines than I thought I had, thanks to Walter Farley. (Me: "I don't know much about TB bloodlines." Also me: "Hm. Broomstick... why do I - oh, right, Whisk Broom." Thank you, Walter Farley, for your Man O'War book, which was evidently formative in my brain.)
That book is also is why I'm delighted I found Man O'War. But I'm also delighted that I found Pot8os. (Did I spend an entire evening when I found that randomly giggling and muttering, "Potoooooooos," to myself? Yes. Yes I did.)
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| Dragon and her grandma |
Apparently the first Thoroughbred sent to America was a 21-year-old stallion named Bulle Rock, imported in 1730. Did not know this. Kind of neat. (Found him, too. As sire of a mare bred after he was imported.)
And then there were the names, lol.
- Three names that are honestly racist, though only one was That Word
- A few names that read as culturally insensitive today - like Hiawatha
- To the namers of Plenipotentiary and Vicissitude, I salute your boldness and pity the race callers.
- Treecreeper. What?
- A son of Pot8os named Asparagus, which for some reason is almost as amusing to me as Pot8os
- How to tell you're in the Victorian era without looking at the birth dates on a pedigree: there's an animal named Albert Victor. Or Semper Victoire.
- You go, mid-1800s breeder who named the daughter of Wisdom and Enigma "Tact"
- The Slayer's Daughter. No, her sire wasn't The Slayer. I don't know, but I'm delighted.
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| Quite possibly the best photo of my dog I've ever taken... lol |
So, all this wandering through pedigrees... what are these kids? Well, Sendera Drafts. But specifically:
Miss Dragon is 62% Percheron, 12% Clydesdale, 6.5% Shire and Hackney, just shy of 4% Appaloosa, and 1.5% Thoroughbred.
Cessa is 56% Appaloosa and 44% Percheron.
Bishop is 38% Shire, 34% Percheron, and 28% Appaloosa.
