Editor's Note: For further reading on this topic, see "Comments on Royal Descent" and "Millennium Queens."

In one of my mystery novels, the heroine, Priscilla Booth, muses about researching her Fitzpen line:

"She liked the sound of the name and its earlier form—FitzPen. It smacked of nobility and might even lead to royalty. She’d like a royal line. After all, didn’t every amateur genealogist have a royal line or two?"

Among the reasons professional, amateur, and non-genealogists might like to find a royal line in their ancestry are these:

1. To know who they are. Every individual is a product of his or her ancestors, whether or not that ancestor was well-known. It would be reverse snobbism to ignore the important personalities we descend from, for they are just as much a part of us as are our nameless peasant ancestors. Also, after going back perhaps to 1538, when the first English parish registers started, virtually all the records we have pertain to the higher-ranking people.

2. To see their ancestors’ place in history. The loss of history is one of the catastrophes of our age. One of the most interesting ways to make history come alive is to see the role our ancestors played in it.

3. For the challenge of doing the research.

4. To join hereditary societies.

The paradox is this: On the one hand, many people have one or more royal lines; on the other, few people can really prove it. When it comes to English royal lines, which have been my area of specialty¹, kings were frequently prolific, and they did not always confine their begetting activities to their wives. King Henry I of England, for example, had twenty-two known illegitimate children, and the genes of all royal offspring are equally valid in providing heritage. By the normal multiplication factor inherent in genealogy, we would expect some lines descending from royal children of medieval times to expand into thousands of descendants living today.²

Although there are many possibilities, finding a royal line is difficult because ordinarily it means going back many generations. Those few people who effortlessly know their royal lines are usually the relatively recent descendants of kings and queens. Prince William can go back to a reigning queen in just two generations.

A less obvious example is Gillian (Graham) Wagner, widow of the late British herald Sir Anthony Wagner, who goes back to King Charles II in nine generations—in some 328 years. But she had a grandfather who was a baron, a great-grandfather who was an earl, and a great-great-grandfather who was a duke. Few of us can make such claims.

For most of us, including experienced genealogists able to search old English records and find proof, it would take twenty-five to thirty generations or more to get back to royalty, many times more than Gillian Wagner.

Most of us wanting to find a royal line will have to search to medieval times, and that means tracing the line generation by generation over many centuries.

Necessarily, this can require working with many unfamiliar types of records. In England, these include charter rolls, close rolls, patent rolls, Curia Regis rolls, Feet of Fines, inquisitions post mortem, ancient wills, and others. Many times, a knowledge of Latin and Norman French is required, and documents will generally be in unfamiliar handwriting.

Several case studies may help researchers appreciate the magnitude of the quest of locating royal lines. George Andrews Moriarty, a prominent genealogist of yesteryear, traced several royal lines for himself. One of his lines coincides with one of my own ten generations back, and I’ll use this to show how difficult it was for him to prove his royal descent, and how easy it was for me to latch onto it.

My father knew that his great-grandmother was born Sarah Sargent. I confirmed this by an examination of such public records as birth, marriage, and death certificates and wills and deeds. Continuing with public records, I found that Sarah Sargent was the daughter of John Sargent, the son of Thomas Sargent, the son of Samuel Sargent, the son of John Sargent, the son of William Sargent, of Charlestown and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. William Sargent, a lay minister, was the immigrant from England, the one I call a gateway ancestor—the original immigrant to the United States.

Here is where I joined the line of Moriarty. He also descended from this William Sargent. It was fairly easy for me to trace the American records back to this common ancestor. It would, however, have been difficult for me to trace some of the records in England, and perhaps impossible to trace others. Fortunately, Moriarty had already published the necessary scholarly work.³

Moriarty’s series of articles represented arduous work over many years. He showed that William Sargent of New England came from Courteenhall, Northamptonshire in England, and that his grandmother was a Margaret Gifford. The name Gifford (originally Giffard) was a much honored one in medieval England, so Moriarty had an encouraging clue, but only a clue, since many unrelated people can have the same surname.

Nonetheless, further research connected this Margaret Gifford to a particular branch of the Giffards, which resulted in Moriarty’s detailed tracing of fourteen more generations of the family back to the eleventh century. This work led him to many notable nobles, but did not yield a royal line.

As an aside to show how genealogy leads into history, Margaret’s father was a Nicholas Giffard, who is described in public records as a gentleman in the king’s household and as being "recommended to Thomas Cromwell." Giffard was active under Cromwell in the work of dissolving the monasteries. Cromwell had been King Henry VIII’s chief lieutenant in what was in effect the confiscation of the monasteries in the 1530s. This was one of the most significant events in the history of England. Its results are recognizable today in the family seat names of many noble families that benefited when they obtained these monasteries from King Henry; one such is Woburn Abbey, home of the dukes of Bedford.

Another family member, Baron John Giffard (an ancestor on Moriarty’s collateral line), was a principal player in a Greek-like tragedy—the defeat of an early attempt to reform England under Simon de Montfort. Montfort lost his cause and his life at the 1265 A.D. Battle of Evesham; arguably, Giffard might have been the main reason for the royal victory.

In tracing any line, genealogists should always pay careful attention to the spouses of the various people in the line. In this case, it was a spouse of one of the Giffards that led Moriarty back to his royal antecedent. Keep in mind that each shift from one surname to another can be like going back to square one. Moriarty had to try to follow the line of each woman who had married his Giffards. Lucy de Morteyn, who had married another Sir John Giffard in the 1300s, went back in two generations to a Gobion line, and the Gobions in two generations tied into a Merlay line through marriage with Agnes de Merlay. The grandmother of Agnes de Merlay was Juliana of Dunbar, granddaughter of Gospatric I, who in five more generations went back to King Ethelred II, a great-great-grandson of King Alfred the Great.⁴ Thus the royal line was found, but it was far from easy.

How, then, do researchers with less time and specialization find a royal line? The best way is to use the right publications. Libraries with large genealogical sections can be big helps. When you have carried your line back to what I call the gateway ancestor, consult with specialist employees at a good genealogical library to learn about the best books and genealogical journals for continuing your research. One excellent periodical is The Genealogist, which frequently carries painstakingly researched articles of royal lines.

As a briefer case in point, I was able to carry my mother’s side to a Sherman line and thence to a Cooke, a Trowbridge, and a Leete line. William Leete, Esq., was a seventeenth-century governor of Connecticut. An article by Frederick Lewis Weis⁵ showed descent from Leete back to Charlemagne—going through some of the most illustrious nobles of medieval England. However, in order to be valid, the article had to give adequate references for each of the twenty-eight generations between Governor Leete and Charlemagne. I personally checked Weis’s references and was not satisfied with one connection, yet the part of the line I was sure was valid showed promise of royal connections if it could be traced through some person other than the one I questioned.

However, more recent investigations by Charles Fitch-Northen of Devon, England took my Trowbridge line back to Charlemagne. Although I haven’t done my own checking on this new line, other respected genealogists believe it is a valid one.

Another way to begin researching a royal line is to become acquainted with the surnames of some of the gateway ancestors whose lines have already been validated. Remember that the inclusion of a line in a book is not sufficient evidence; the references should be considered starting points for further research. Two books that may be helpful are Ancestral Roots of Sixty Colonists and The Magna Charta Sureties—1215, both by Frederick Lewis Weis and Walter Lee Sheppard, Jr. These references have been printed in a number of editions and are available to purchase, and are in many genealogical libraries. They contain lines going back to royalty or high-ranking nobility, in England, starting with a seventeenth-century American immigrant. Each generation is accompanied by supporting references.

Some colonial American occupations are better than others as indicators of possible royal lines. Generally, the younger sons of kings passed into the nobility, and the younger sons of nobles often passed into the gentry, but neither passed below gentry status. Thus, if we can trace our ancestry to the leading men and women of the colonies (who often came from the gentry), such as a minister, we have a better chance of finding royal lines. Ministers, governors, the few people entitled to use the title Esq. (one entitled to a coat of arms) after their names, people addressed as "Mr." instead of "Goodman," higher army officers, or the richer farmers and merchants are good starting points.

If we try to find new lines for a gateway ancestor, not previously researched successfully by someone else, we immediately run into the difficulty of tracing that ancestor across the Atlantic. It is at this point that many false royal lines have been claimed. We find a John Doe in seventeenth-century America who can’t be traced back any further, so we look up the name in some of the more helpful indexes, such as the International Genealogical Index (IGI). We find a Sir Jonathan Doe in England of more or less the same time. So we jump to the conclusion that obviously the English Sir Jonathan Doe came to America, changed his name from Jonathan to John, and dropped the prestigious title Sir.

Don’t be too eager to claim someone as your ancestor simply because that person has a name similar to someone in your line. I once looked up a Degory Priest in England thinking there wouldn’t be many people with that name at a given time, but there were. My wife did considerable research to find a man named General Wilson, with General as the first name. We were surprised to discover how many people gave that unusual first name to their children.

If we can positively identify our gateway ancestor with his origin in England, there are numerous records that can be checked further. Certainly the IGI is a starting point because it leads to English sources such as the invaluable parish records. There are books available that go into great detail on English records going back from the seventeenth century to the eleventh century. One I would recommend is Sir Anthony Wagner’s English Genealogy.

If you trace yourself back to a noble—baron, viscount, earl, marquis, or duke—the rest of the work may be much easier. The Complete Peerage by George E. Cokayne is one of the most reliable sources available to trace the lineages of English nobles. Its documentation is outstanding and a model for other sources. Long out of print, The Complete Peerage will again be made available this year, comprising the original thirteen volumes reissued in six books.

When you are convinced you have found a royal line, let it lead you to other things. As mentioned above, seeing how your ancestors participated in the important activities of history can be most satisfying, and learning more history through genealogy is a useful by-product. If you are interested in hereditary societies, get information on them and see what their requirements are for membership. You may be surprised how many societies there are where royal or noble ancestry is a requirement.

One society that insists on valid evidence is the Descendants of the Illegitimate Sons and Daughters of the Kings of Britain, sometimes called the Royal Bastards.⁶ This society has made a name for itself primarily by its careful examination of the generation-by-generation evidence presented by prospective members. If your line is approved, you can be reasonably certain it will stand up as a credible line.

People who want to find royal lines but lack time, inclination, or experience have an alternative open to them. There are many highly qualified professional genealogists who will perform the research for a reasonable fee. Many of these professionals are accredited and possess the necessary experience in one or more specialized fields of genealogy. Look for those who have been certified by the Board for Certification of Genealogists, or accredited by the LDS Family History Library. Some of the fellows of the highly respected American Society of Genealogists (ASG) will also do professional genealogical research in their areas of expertise. There are, of course, other researchers without initials who are competent and honest investigators. However, unless you have some other means of satisfying yourself on a given researcher’s reliability, the initials indicating acceptance by some of the above-mentioned top American genealogical organizations might be the best bet.

2. In my book, Applied Genealogy (Ancestry, 1988), I point out that any living person today would have 1,024 ancestral lines in ten generations (roughly going back some 300 years). Going back 800 years to 1100 A.D. could result in having 100 million ancestral lines. The reverse, however, is not true; any person alive in 1100 could have had several children, with the line of descent still becoming extinct in so many future generations.

3. New England Historical and Genealogical Register (NEHGR), 74:231-7, 267-283; 75:57-63; 79:358-378, and The Genealogist (N.S.). (The London journal of this name should not be confused with either of two American journals with similar names): 38:91-98, 128-134.

4. The line from American immigrant William Sargent back to King Alfred the Great can be seen with references in any edition of Frederick Lewis Weis and Walter Lee Sheppard, Jr., Ancestral Roots of Sixty Colonists (Genealogical Publishing Company).

5. "Descent of William Leete, Governor of Connecticut, from the Emperor Charlemagne," in The American Genealogist (TAG), Vol. 31:114-116.

6. For more information on Descendants of the Illegitimate Sons and Daughters of the Kings of Britain society, see my article "A Look at the Royal, er, ahem … Bounders?" in the Sept/Oct 1987 issue of The Ancestry Newsletter.