If you were Prince William or Prince Harry, of course you would have grown up expecting to see the faces of your ancestors on coins. After all, their paternal grandmother’s face appears on more coins than any person in history, a record which will certainly never be broken.
But for me, as I guess it is for you, the expectation of ever seeing a coin with the face of one of my ancestors seemed as ridiculously absurd as the possibility of me visiting Saturn.
Then all of a sudden, there he was! And he’s on a magnificent coin, a Roman Caesar (junior emperor) being a savior of London.
It happened in a used bookstore in Downtown Hilo. I was skimming through The History and Conquests of Ancient Rome by Nigel Rogers when I was halted by the 1,700 year old coin.
I read about the conquering hero depicted on the coin, and discovered that he was the father of someone who, according to the ancestral history mapped out in the Family Forest®, I have many different ancestral pathways to.
In fact, almost a decade ago I had written about discovering that I could see his son in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I also created what I believe is an amazing Family Forest® eBook about his son’s generation-by-generation descendants for 40 generations.
So of course I bought the book. How can anyone not own the book containing photographs of the first coin one discovers depicting his or her ancestor?
Constantius Chlorus is an ancestor of probably more than a billion people living today. If you are reading this in English (or French, or German, or Spanish, or Russian, etc.), he is almost certainly one of yours. I hope you enjoy the discovery, cousin.