British royal baby has mixed lineage
Paris: Even before the birth of the new British royal baby to Prince William and his wife Kate, genealogists are looking into its family tree, and are coming up with many surprises.
The baby’s relations will stretch from a simple Parisian actress via the Dracula princes in Romania, to even an Islamic sultan from Seville in Spain, who descended from the Muslim Prophet Mohammed, experts say.
The family tree of the baby’s father Prince William, who is second in line to the throne, is strongly tied to the European Gotha line. There one finds, alongside all Britain’s kings, the sovereigns of Greece, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Austria, Spain and a good number of German sovereigns. The British family was called Saxe-Coburg-Gotha un-til 1917, date on which, mired in a war with Germany, it opted for the name Windsor.
On the side of the mother-to-be Kate Middleton, on the other hand, there is a majority of commoners.
The late “Queen Mum”, the mother of Queen Elizabeth II, and Princess Diana, William’s mother, were not born princesses. But “William’s all-iance with Kate Middleton really managed to democratise the baby’s family tree,” the famous genealogist Jean-Louis Beaucarnot, who dissected the baby’s ascendance in July in the “La Revue Francaise de Genealogie” (the French genealogy review) said.
The future king or queen of the UK will be cousin with a large number of subjects. The paternal forefathers of Kate, who is the Duchess of Cambridge, were relatively well off. However, 'on her mom’s side she has largely working class ancestry', Scott Steward, member of the New England Historic genealogical Society said.
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