IT'S RATHER disappointing to go prowling through your ancestors in quest of knights in shining armor living in crenellated castles only to find they were sheepshearers, or worse, went barefoot through goat poo and probably mixed their ale and mead.

Nor, in my case, were matters made any more romantic by the discovery that a fair number of my forebears sprung from a farm village where the population never reached more than 840 until coal mining came along to make the place much bigger and a lot grimmer.

Not a lot has changed in Darfield, there on a sandstone ridge in the Yorkshire dales of England. Some 8,500 hardy souls call it home there these days, but you still can buy neither a guitar nor an ocarina in Darfield, nor a skateboard, nor a bike.

In fact, the high life in Darfield appears to be the Maurice Dobson Museum and Heritage Center, down at 2 Vicar Road, but best go on Wednesday afternoon and Saturday morning, since the shop and café are closed the rest of the time.

Now truth be told, I've never been to Darfield. And what I've read about the place in the Knowhere Guide doesn't really inspire me to climb in the car and drive the 100 miles or so to get to it, particularly at a cost of $5 per gallon of gasoline.

I mean, after all, the G.T. News and Mawis the cornershop on the Barnsley Road is not the Louvre, nor the Leaning Tower of Pisa, nor even the souk in Damascus, where you can buy an Arabian coffeepot that works provided you don't let it anywhere near a cooker or other source of heat.

Rather, my interest in Darfield stems from the fact that one Richard Cawthorne I, my granddad with nine "greats" in front of it, was born there in 1594. (He also died there 89 years later. Grandpappy Richard wasn't much of a getabout.)

Now in between all those porno photos of some of the ugliest women in Christendom, adverts informing you that you've won a Volkswagen Beetle, or probably not, and messages promising a cornucopia of platinum credit cards, the Internet has a few magic boxes you can open.

Among these are genealogy Websites, veritable electronic roadways into the distant past, over which you can travel to your antecedents of decades or centuries gone by. But be advised that the reality may be well awry of your (almost always) overfond expectations.

It is a fact that in any run-of-the-mill home for the bewildered, the folks who believe in reincarnation invariably are convinced they once ruled as Napoleon or Cleopatra or Attila the Hun - always some noteworthy personality.

Were they to be believed, one could only draw the conclusion that the global population once consisted entirely of George Washingtons and Julius Caesars and Queen Elizabeths and Leonardo da Vincis and the like, by which one could also conclude that the world since has surely gone to hell in a badly woven handbasket.

No nuthouse dingbat ever spent his or her previous lives as Liefric the Weird, picking nits from neighborhood children down at the local barber shop, or Pepe le Peau, whose main contact with fame was piling on the timber at Joan of Arc's public barbecue.

Much the same mentality exists when you go on the geneaology trail. You look for your links to Richard the Lionheart, or Charlemagne, or Paul Revere. Then you find Josephus Snively, your grandpop with a couple or three "greats," who ran the sewage works down in East Orangutan, New Jersey.

So it was in my case, although I suppose it could have been a lot worse. Richard Cawthorne I, of Darfield Parish, is described in records of the time as an "extensive landowner" in the vales and moors that constituted what was tellingly described as "one great sheep run" in west Yorkshire.

Whatever he had, he didn't leave a lot of it to posterity, which is probably just as well, since the whole area today is chockablock with sheep that have come down with foot-and-mouth disease and wouldn't be worth a whole lot on the open market.

His son, Richard Cawthorne II, also born in Darfield Parish (Richard I, as I said, didn't get out a lot), appears to have fared a bit better, expanding his horizons all the way to London, whence he repaired in 1635 to fight as a cavalier for King Charles I against Oliver Cromwell's Roundheads in England's civil war.

Cavalier old Rich may have been, but that wasn't a particularly brilliant career move. King Chuck lost to Cromwell's volk and his head rolled on the scaffold in London. Rich Cawthorne kept his, mostly down, survived the troubles and went into tailoring.

Anyway, according to the records, old Rich apparently did rather well for himself and seems to have established one claim to fame, however dubious. One account has it that he designed the, well, colorful Elizabethan-style uniforms that the "Beefeater" guards at the Tower of London wear to this day.

For that accomplishment alone, Richard Cawthorne II should have been stripped of his tailor's tape measure on grounds that his work was threatening the horses. Instead, he popped his clogs in London and was dumped into a vault beneath St. Mildred's Poultry Church.

He appears to have left $400,000 to his heirs for "services delivered ... in the Tower of London." Whatever, there is none of it left today, the heirs doubtless having rid themselves of it via licentious living in the stews and alehouses of King George III's London.

As for Rich himself, his bones were well and truly buried when Hitler's Luftwaffe destroyed St. Mildred's, and what remains of his carcass today supports a steel and concrete dealing house that towers over London's financial district.

Ah, well, there are other branches of the family trees of Webbs and Cauthens and Vanlandinghams to explore, and maybe there's a castle or three back there somewhere.

All good fun, so try ancestor prowling up the trees yourself. Only don't be surprised if you find the crooks and conmen in the limbs vastly outnumber the kings and counts.

Thought for the Week: Just when you think you've won the rat race, along come faster rats.

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