Definition
A Latin term from Roman civil law meaning ascendants — that is, a person's lineal ancestors in the direct ascending line: parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on upward through successive generations. The term operates as the formal civil law designation for this class of relatives, distinguishing them from descendants (descendentes) and collateral relations. In Roman law, the category of adscendentes carried legal significance primarily in matters of marriage prohibition, inheritance, succession, and guardianship.
Common Confusion
Adscendentes is occasionally conflated with the broader term agnati (agnates), which refers to kindred related through the male line regardless of direction. The distinction matters in civil law research: adscendentes is a directional category (upward lineal), while agnati is a mode-of-connection category that can include both ascendants and collaterals. A researcher encountering either term in a civil law source should not treat them as interchangeable.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources touching on Roman civil law or jurisdictions whose private law descends from the Roman tradition — principally the Continental European codes, Scottish law, Louisiana, Quebec, and Puerto Rico. Researchers working in common law sources will rarely encounter it outside a glossary or treatise context.
The citations in both Black's editions point to the Corpus Juris Civilis: Digest 23.2.68 concerns prohibited degrees of marriage (the bar on marrying adscendentes), and Codex 5.5.6 addresses related restrictions. These are precise and navigable references. A researcher tracing the legal treatment of consanguinity prohibitions in marriage or succession should treat adscendentes as a gateway term into the Digest's family-law titles.
In historical American legal sources, the term surfaces mainly in treatises on civil law, conflict of laws, or Louisiana succession law — contexts where authors drew directly on Roman or Spanish civil law sources. If you encounter adscendentes in a 19th-century American legal text, the author is almost certainly writing in a civil law mode or translating a civil law concept, not applying common law categories.
There is also a practical indexing trap: older digitized legal texts sometimes render the term as "ascendentes" (the more Latinized spelling also in common use) or simply translate it without preserving the Latin. Cross-searching under ascendentes and ascendants in addition to adscendentes will recover a fuller picture of the relevant sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's editions — the first and second — give virtually identical entries: a bare Latin identification, the English gloss "ascendants," and the two Corpus Juris citations. There is no substantive divergence between editions. Neither entry elaborates on the legal consequences attaching to the category, the scope of the prohibited degrees, or the distinction between adscendentes and related civil law kinship terms. For a term whose legal significance lies entirely in what Roman law did with the category, the historical dictionary entries function as little more than signposts. They confirm the term's civil law provenance and supply precise corpus references, but researchers will need to go directly to the Digest and Codex passages — or to a Roman law treatise — to understand how the category operated.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs to the civil law tradition and has no technical standing in common law systems. In the United States, it is most likely to appear in Louisiana legal materials, where civil law inheritance and family law structures historically tracked Roman and French sources. Researchers working in other American jurisdictions should treat adscendentes as a comparative or historical term only.