Half-cousins Abound in RD 900 Second Edition

One of the reasons millions of Americans—and especially descendants of New England colonists—have royal ancestry has to do with inheritance practices of western European nations. As Gary Boyd Roberts explained in the Volume 19:3 (2018) issue of American Ancestors Magazine, “Younger sons or daughters of kings (who are entitled to nothing) become or marry nobles, and those of the nobility become or marry “gentry”—knights, manorial lords, gentlemen with coats-of-arms, baronets, lairds, and seigneurs. Younger sons or daughters of the gentry become or marry merchants or clergymen, Puritan or Huguenot leaders, university fellows, bureaucrats, or professional soldiers. Members of these last groups or their younger sons and daughters immigrate to the American colonies, Quebec, and later the United States.” Add to this the intermarriage among royalty itself, and you have the makings for even more pathways to royal descent. Distant cousinhood, of course, or half-cousinhood, or even many generations removed cousinhood, but nonetheless cousinhood.

To cite just one example, Henry II of England (d. 1189) through his illegitimate son William Longespee (daughter of Ida de Toeni), was the ancestor, sixteen generations later, of Rhode Island immigrant Audrey Barlow. One of Audrey’s (and of course Henry II’s) descendants, through her daughter Anne Almy, was President Warren Harding. But Harding is only one of the presidential descents in this family. President Richard Nixon, on his mother’s side, is a direct descendant of Anne Almy’s brother Christopher. And Jimmy Carter, our 39^th President, also descends from Henry II, through Job Morris, Christopher Almy’s great-granddaughter.

Or, consider that John “Lackland,” King of England (of Magna Charta fame) sired several illegitimate children; Richard FitzRoy, was one of them. One of his  descendants, seventeen generations later, was the immigrant ancestor Henry Corbin of Virginia. Richard’s eight-time great-granddaughter, Margaret Pulsey, was the three-time great-grandmother of Ralph Joplin—the immigrant ancestor of songstress Janis Joplin. Given John “Lackland’s” proclivity to have affairs, there is no telling how many half cousins his descendants may have.

Anyone of the following celebrities could be your half-cousin:  ycho Brahe, astronomer; Sir Francis Bacon, scientist and statesman; Peter Paul Rubens, painter and diplomat; David Hume, philosopher; Marquis de La Fayette, Revolutionary War hero; Arthur Welleslely, 1^st Duke of Wellington, victor at Battle of Waterloo; Henry David Thoreau, author; Robert E Lee; Leo, Count Tolstoy; Sir Winston Churchill; Wernher von Braun; and through their wives, Hernan Cortes, Spanish conquistador; Sir Christopher Wren, architect; Charles Darwin; and Karl Marx. And in the field of literature alone, we have Jane Austen, James Boswell, Lord Byron, John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Bertrand Russell, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jonathan Swift, and the wife of poet Edmund Spencer.

You won’t know which famous genes you carry until you have a look at The Royal Descents of 900 Immigrants to the American Colonies, Quebec, or the United States. Why not check it out today?