The Royal Descents of 600 Immigrants

The 2006 edition of The Royal Descents of 600 Immigrants is, in the author’s opinion, worth the price even for owners of the edition of 2004. A new indexed Addendum and a Coda outline descents from kings for nineteen additional immigrants, improves the lines of eighteen more, lowers the descent for eight others, fully disproves one, and suggests disproof for a further seven. The nineteen new immigrants include the following colonial figures who left thousands, perhaps millions, of descendants: Mrs. Elizabeth Bullock Clement(s) and Mrs. Judith Knapp Hubbard of Mass.; Mrs. Dorothy Beresford Broadnax, Mrs. Abigail Smith Burwell, and Mrs. Frances Baldwin Townshend Jones Williams of VA; and James Blount of NC. Colonial governors or other early notables, or immigrants with relatively few descendants include Thomas Boone (NJ and SC), Mrs. Mary Woodcock Bridges of Mass., Henry Hamilton Cox of PA, Lady Elizabeth Tate Hardy (NY), Thomas Jernegan and Thomas Law of VA, James William Maitland of NY (from the 2004 Addendum, a great-great-grandfather of Howard Dean), Mrs. Millicent Kate McLaughlin Rose of NY (forebear of some of the Hearsts of CA), and Seth Southill of NC. Twentieth-century figures include the wife of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the husbands of Beatrice Lillie and rock music icon Madonna. A final immigrant is Anders Leonard Gyllenhaal of Chicago, great-great-grandfather of actors Jake and Maggie. Mrs. Clement(s) and Mrs. Brodnax are ancestors of the two presidents Bush, and Mrs. Clement(s) is the second American immigrant RD forebear of Sir Winston Churchill.

Incorporated into the main text or a notes section in the new Addendum are all improved lines based on Douglas Richardson’s two mammoth compendia, both GPC works, Plantagenet Ancestry and Magna Carta Ancestry or on Michel Call’s The Royal Ancestry Bible, all published in 2004 or 2005. Also published in these years were a variety of articles that developed some of the above lines or consolidated data in the 2004 edition of RD600, plus two volumes of the fourth edition of Adventurers of Purse and Person (by John Frederick Dorman); The Ark and the Dove Adventurers (by George E. and Donna V. Russell), also from GPC; Medieval Welsh Ancestors of Certain Americans (by Carl Boyer 3rd); and two volumes by Marston Watson on the colonial progeny of Governor Thomas Dudley and the Marbury sisters, the famed Anne Hutchinson and Katherine Marbury Scott. An eighth edition of Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists appeared as well.

Material from these works that could be inserted into the main text of RD600 without altering page numbers appears in this 2006 edition. Improved or lowered royal descents, plus disproofs or doubts, are discussed in a narrative introduction to the 2006 Addendum. Following this Introduction, a Notes section also covers lines between a figure listed in the main text and a notable descendant most mentioned in the 2004 edition— Mrs. Karl Marx, the Marquis de Sade, Calvin Coolidge, Jimmy Carter, Ben Bradlee, Owen Wistor, Graham Greene, and Sir Winston Churchill. Also discussed in this section are the slightly-lowered lines for William Wentworth of NH and Christopher Lawson of Mass., a much improved line for the Eltonhead sisters of VA and MD, and a new line for various immigrants from Henry II, King of England via Longespee, Odingfell, Herdeburgh, and Boteler. Other much improved immigrants treated in this Note section are Colepeppers (Culpeper) of VA, and Thomas Bradbury of Mass. (this last from the late Marshall Kirk). A final note outlines a twelfth royal descent for 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry, from Reverend William Skepper/Skipper of Mass. Improvements or changes in the royal descent literature of 2004 and 2005 have been considerable and as an amalgam of these changes Mr. Roberts feels his new book will add to the ancestral knowledge of millions of Americans.