Genealogical Connections
by Gary Boyd Roberts
The wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles elicited
some excitement among genealogists, even though Mrs. Parker Bowles
became a duchess, and then a princess. William Addams
Reitwiesner has prepared an ancestor table for Camilla Rosemary
Shand (b. 1947) for ten or more generations, available at
http://www.wargs.com/royal/camilla.html.
In addition, Gary Boyd Roberts treated the New England ancestry
of the Duchess on pp. 87-88 of Notable Kin, Volume
One (1998), the main source of data in the accompanying
chart.
The Duchess has considerable French Canadian ancestry
through Charlotte Coursolles (d. 1803), who appears in the
second generation of this chart. There is also a line to a
very few Pennsylvania residents. Charlotte's husband, Ephraim
Jones, however, was fully New England in ancestry, and his
sister Mary was the grandmother of Henry David Thoreau, as
shown above.
Ephraim Jones was the son of Elisha Jones and Mary Allen,
grandson of Josiah Jones, Jr. and Abigail Barnes and of Nathaniel
Allen and Lydia ____ (whose identification is eagerly sought).
New Englanders in the next generation are Josiah Jones and
Lydia Treadway, Thomas Barnes and Abigail Goodenow, and Joseph
Allen and Anne Brazier. In the next generation we encounter
Lewis Jones and Anne ____, Nathaniel Treadway and Sufferance
Haynes, Thomas Goodenow and Jane ____, and Walter Allen and
Rebecca ____. The Joneses and Treadways were of Watertown,
the Goodenows of Sudbury and Marlborough, and the Allens of
Newbury, Charlestown, and then Watertown.
Thus a sizable number of New England-derived Americans, including
no doubt numerous NEHGS members, find themselves distantly
related to the Duchess of Cornwall. She and Prince Charles
will not have children, but she may be involved in royal activities
for several decades. For those interested in royal kinships
among spouses, the late Diana, Princess of Wales and the Duchess were both descended from the 2nd earl of Albemarle.
Kinships between Charles and Camilla are somewhat more distant,
but common forebears include Henry Cavendish, 2nd Duke of
Newcastle, Villiers kinsmen of the noted two dukes of Buckingham,
and probably some Scottish peers or lairds. Finally, I wish
to state that I find very unconvincing the allegations that
the Duchess' maternal grandmother was a daughter of
Edward VII rather than Hon. George Keppel. All of the American
and French-Canadian ancestry of Mrs. Parker Bowles is derived,
I must confess, however, through the Keppels. |
