Help me understand my horse's pedigree?

spookypony

spookypony

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For the first time, I have a horse whose parents are actually known! Thus, my interest in breeding has progressed beyond "has it got 4 functioning legs, is it friendly, and can it do what I would like it to do?" :p

The dam is a Lipizzaner registered with the BLHS. A brief google reveals that there appear to be several parallel societies in GB for Lipizzaner horses...what's going on here? Was there a fight or something? :confused: Her various ancestors all have names that include a variety of Roman numerals and Arabic numerals, as well as boy-sounding names that I've determined refer to stallion lines, and girl-sounding names that I'm assuming might refer to mare lines (???).

How is a Lipizzaner name generated? For example, one great-great-granddam is named Maestoso XXIX-6 (probably went by Mickey Mouse in the stable, poor thing... :p ), and one great-grandsire is named Favory Alea I, whereas another great-great-granddam is 42 Pluto XXVI. Why do some names have numbers in front, and others behind? Why do some have two words in, and others only the one?

The sire is a PBA that I'm told is a show pony stallion; his breed shows as "British Riding Pony" (which as near as I can figure out means something pony-sized with traceable ancestry, but I'm willing to be enlightened on this matter!). His name is Padrig Page Boy. I can see that there are some Arabs especially on his dam's side, but I'm curious to know how much Arab, and where in the pedigree, makes a horse PBA.

I was told that my horse is 1/4 Arab 1/4 Welsh (which Welsh?), but I suspect this is sort of an estimate of the sire's ancestry...

Any enlightening comments would be very much appreciated; I'm incredibly confused by it all, but willing to learn! :)
 
Can't help you re registries but this is a good article with information on the naming conventions:

http://www.dressageunltd.com/SRS/about/horses5.htm

I can't say if the BLHS continues to conform though. There are other breakaway registries for breeds with historical naming conventions that don't adhere to the standards but allow names that kind of seem right, which makes it very confusing.
 
Thank you! That article helps me make sense of much that is going on on the dam's side, except the mare names a few generations back still confuse me a little: knowing a stallion's name then ought to allow one to predict his dam's name, but that doesn't seem to hold true for the great-great-grand generation. Hmm! :confused:
 
This link explains the naming system for Lipizzaners. http://www.uslipizzan.org/winter-2011.html

Show/riding ponies tend to have a mix of breeds in them as they are a 'type', but often Welsh B, arab and TB feature in their pedigrees. PBA's must have a minimum of 12 1/2% arabian blood to compete as PBA's. So that's equivalent to having one arab great-grand parent.
 
Thanks, Faracat! That link seems to refer mainly to that particular stud's system, but it does give an insight as to where the arabic numbers in front of the names come from.

I've managed to wander along the TB lines, where again I haven't a clue (beyond the obvious like Eclipse and the foundation stallions and some of their famous relatives (who names a horse "Sea Sick"?? That was in 1638)), and the Arabian lines, which mostly seem to peter out in the early 19th century...did those studs not keep track? One line seems to skip a few generations, because there's a horse listed ca. 1800, and then about 3 generations farther back, we're suddenly in 1592. That's some ooooooooold horses having foals! :o
 
Maybe the lines petered out because the horses were imported? The Blunts, for example bought a lot from the Bedouins and some from Egypt and imported them over to Crabbet Park Stud.
 
There's quite a few that stop at "desert bred", and the bit with the pictures in shows quite a few of them to be Crabbets. Was any join-up ever made between the Arab pedigrees and their GB continuation? I thought the Arabs kept track of such things?
 
Yes, they did record the pedigrees, but I don't know if they shared them with the horses' new European owners. Plus the horses were often renamed after their new owners, hence 'the Godolphin arabian' owned by the Earl of Godolphin etc...
 
spookypony said:
Thank you! That article helps me make sense of much that is going on on the dam's side, except the mare names a few generations back still confuse me a little: knowing a stallion's name then ought to allow one to predict his dam's name, but that doesn't seem to hold true for the great-great-grand generation. Hmm! :confused:
Click to expand...

I think that is where the recycling of names comes in. Mares don't have to have names related to their family lines and the same name can crop up in different generations in different families. So you might see two stallions with the same dam name but they're not actually out of the same mare.

As an aside, the naming of stallion sons can be a tricky area in warmbloods books, too. The horses "World Cup" I through IV are not successive generations but a sire and then three of his sons! There is also the confusion regarding suffixes and prefixes - "Ramiro" and "G Ramiro Z" are the same horse, the extra letters just designate where he was standing when he appears in various pedigrees.
 
Good lord! This is all terribly confusing! :confused: . Oddly, the dam's line seems to be missing entirely from allpedigree.com; I wonder if I can find it elsewhere (the various Lipizzaner societies don't appear to have online databases for searching). I only have it as far back as great-great-grandparents in the passport.
 
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