Excerpt from The King Family of Suffield, Connecticut, Its English Ancestry, 1389-1662: And American Descendants, 1662-1908, Comprising Numerous Branches in Many States of the United States, Also Appendices Containing Information Concerning Some of Its Maternal Ancestors Family names were in use among the Romans and the great antiquity of the early Roman patrician gentes is indisputable, yet toward the close of the republic there were not more than fifty patrician families. (dionys. I. Even in these, owing to the frequency of the practice of adoption, while the historical iden tity of the family was certain, yet it was no guarantee Of the personal genealogy Of the individual. The plebeians also began to preserve the busts and names Of those Of their family who attained to curule Office. The many and great social changes, however, which marked the closing centuries Of the Western Empire militated with great strength against the maintenance Of an aristocracy by birth and as a consequence family names fell into disuse. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.