Few today would agree with Thomas Carlyle that ‘the history of the world is but the Biography of great men’, but the nature of the surviving source material from Anglo-Saxon England means that saints, kings, archbishops, bishops and earldormen are disproportionately represented in the writing of that period's history. I cannot pretend that this study offers any insights into the lives of peasants in eleventhcentury England, but it does present a rare opportunity to trace a family of thegnly status across several generations and to examine some of the strategies employed by them in order to survive both the problems of settling in a strange land and the turbulent politics of the eleventh century. Members of the Swart kin-group were not figures of national importance: they were on the periphery of the royal court and therefore occasionally dragged into national politics, but in general they lived their lives beneath the notice of chroniclers, hagiographers or historians. One text that did capture some aspects of their family structure and landholding, however, was Domesday Book. The Domesday aspects of this case study have formed a part of my teaching on using Domesday for several years as they allow students to explore many of the different techniques employed to trace pre-Conquest landholders within the Domesday text, and reveal both the potential for, and the pitfalls of, using Domesday evidence across many counties and circuits. Many of these techniques are those so patiently explained to students by Ann Williams herself and used to such good effect in her many articles and books.