The purpose of the following pages has been to write a presumptive history of the DeQuetteville family, ranging from the years 750 to 1300. The result has been to offer a potential re-writing of the history of the Viking settlement of Normandy and the Channel Islands. Essentially, I believe there is enough evidence to make the claim that a clan of Hebridean-based Vikings, led by Ketil ‘Flatnefr’ Bjarnarson (a.k.a. Caitil Find), formed settlements in La Manche, Normandy, as early as the 860s.
I first became interested in family history when I was 15. Over the past 40 years, I’ve been digging up leads and reading around the history. I’ve assembled a detailed tree in Ancestry that draws a solid line to 1500. But it is only in the last 15 years, after I had completed doctoral studies in modern literature, that I discovered the Scandinavian origins of the DeQuetteville name. Since then I have been trying to account for any distant connections.
At the outset, I’d like to make clear that there are some gaps arising from the difficulty of relying on primary and secondary texts mostly through open-source material. I wish to remedy that shortcoming. In the meantime, I heartily invite all interested parties to help fill in those gaps by providing commentary on the assertions presented here.
Each of the pages to be found here are updated regularly, so please follow or check in periodically.
I believe that in any good history imagination has a role to play. Yet imagination is only helpful insofar as it is supported by facts.
A deQuetteville Family History 