Shortly, before to my Dad's death, I became aware of facts about my dad's parents, and his parent's families, which had been kept from me before.
My dad had seldom mentioned much about his childhood, or his parents. He had only told me that his mom had died when he was in his early teens. He old me that his dad died a year after her, while my dad watched him shave one morning, I guess of a heart attack, in 1931. Dad told me that his Father had had a premonition about the stock market failure, and had pulled all of the family money out of the market, and kept his money in cash hidden under his bed. When he died, my dad's oldest sister took all of the money, and bought a glass company during the depression, at depression era prices. This company went on to do very well, as well as this sister and most of his other sisters and his older brother. Apparently my dad was not included in his father's largess and was taken in by another, also neglected, sister. He lived with her until he graduated from high school and left New Jersey when he was seventeen to attend Rice University on scholarship, only to return to New Jersey and Pennsylvania for rare visits. Growing up, I only heard about the sister who had taken him in, Violet. He never really wanted to discuss his other sisters or his only brother. Apparently, they had all benefited from his father's money but him and his sister. Due to his animosity towards them, I was told next to nothing about my father's family. Eventually I learned that my dad knew more than he wanted to say. After his older and only brother died, and my dad subsequently retired, he began a process to resuscitate his long forgotten heritage. Unbeknownst to me while growing up, as I have said my dad was very tight lipped about his family, there was a lineage of nobility in the family tree which had never been mentioned. It seems that my paternal grandmother's only brother had inherited the Duchy of Belgard, which at the time was in Pomerania, a part of the Holy Roman Empire.
After the Communist takeover in Russia, and the loss of the Germans of the First World War, the nobility, with their lands and titles, were seized and incorporated into the area of Northern and Eastern Europe considered as Prussia. As my dad's uncle no longer had land, nor a title that was not recognized by the government of the time, the duchy of Belgard was considered lost to posterity. My dad's cousin, The Baron of Belgard , and the only son of his uncle, The Duke of Belgard, was killed during the Great War. When my grandmother's brother, the Duke, died in the early 1920's, and as no more of her family survived or still lived in Europe, no further thought was given towards the Duchy of Belgard. With Reagan's help in leading to the fall of communism and the liberation and freedom of Eastern Europe, East Germany, and Poland, the possibility of the restoration of the nobility and their titles presented itself.
After several years of legal maneuvering, dad was able to rehabilitate the titles of The Duke and The Baron of Belgard. Since he was the only surviving son of the only sister of the last Duke of Belgard, he made a claim, and was granted legal rights to the titles of Duke and Baron of Belgard. Unfortunately, any of the legal claims of the lands or leases of the Duchy of Belgard were lost to the communists. Prior to my dad's death he transferred the title of Baron of Belgard to me. When dad died in 1997, I inherited the title of The Duke of Belgard. I then transferred the title of The Baron of Belgard to my oldest son, Christopher.
Actress Brooke Shields has a pretty impressive pedigree -- hanging from her family tree are Catherine de Medici and Lucrezia Borgia, Charlemagne and El Cid, William the Conqueror and King Harold II, vanquished by William at the Battle of Hastings.
Shields also descends from five popes, a whole mess of early New England settlers, and the royal houses of virtually every European country. She counts Renaissance pundit Niccolo Machiavelli and conquistador Hernando Cortes as ancestors.
What is it about Brooke Shields? Well, nothing special -- at least genealogically.
Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say, the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.
"Millions of people have provable descents from medieval monarchs," said Mark Humphrys, a genealogy enthusiast and professor of computer science at Dublin City University in Ireland. "The number of people with unprovable descents must be massive."
By the same token, for every king in a person's family tree there are thousands and thousands of people whose births, lives and deaths went completely unrecorded by history. We'll never know about them, because until recently vital records were rare for all but the noble classes.
It works the other way, too. Anybody who had children more than a few hundred years ago is likely to have millions of descendants today, quite a few of them famous.
Take King Edward III, who ruled England during the 14th century and had nine children who survived to adulthood. Among his documented descendants are presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Zachary Taylor, both Roosevelts), authors (Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning), generals (Robert E. Lee), scientists (Charles Darwin) and actors (Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, Brooke Shields). Some experts estimate that 80 percent of England's present population descends from Edward III.
A slight twist of fate could have prevented the existence of all of them. In 1312, the close adviser -- and probably lover -- of Edward II, Piers Gaveston, was murdered by a group of barons frustrated with their king's ineffectual rule. Later that year, the beleaguered king's eldest son, Edward III, was born.
Had Edward II been killed along with Gaveston in 1312 -- a definite possibility at the time -- Edward III might never have been born. He wouldn't have produced the lines of descent that ultimately branched out to include all those presidents, writers and Hollywood stars.
Of course, the only reason we're talking about Edward III is that history remembers him. For every medieval monarch, there are countless long-dead individuals whose intrigues, peccadilloes and luck have steered the course of history simply by determining where, when and with whom they reproduced.
The longer ago somebody lived, the more descendants that person is likely to have today. Humphrys estimates that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, appears on the family tree of every person in the Western world.
Some people have tried to establish a documented line between Muhammad, who was born in the 6th century, and the medieval English monarchs and, thus, to most if not all people of European descent. Nobody has succeeded yet, but one proposed lineage comes close. Though it has several weak links, the line illustrates how lines of descent can wander down through the centuries, connecting famous figures of the past to millions of people living today.
The proposed genealogy runs through Muhammad's daughter Fatima. Her husband Ali, also a cousin of Muhammad, is considered by Shiite Muslims the legitimate heir to leadership of Islam.
Ali and Fatima had a son, al-Hasan, who died in the late 7th century. About three centuries -- 11 generations -- later, his descendant Ismail carried the line to Europe when he became imam of Seville.
Many genealogists dispute the connection between al-Hasan and Ismail, saying it includes characters invented by medieval genealogists to link the Abbadid dynasty, founded by Ismail's son, to Muhammad.
The Abbadid dynasty was celebrated for making Seville a great cultural center at a time when most of Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. The last emir in that dynasty is thought to have had a daughter named Zaida, who is said to have changed her name to Isabel upon converting to Christianity and to have married Alfonso VI, king of Castile and Leon.
Yet there is no good evidence demonstrating that Isabel, who bore one son by Alfonso VI, was the same person as Zaida. So the line between Muhammad and the English monarchs probably breaks at this point.
But if you give the Muhammad-Ismail connection and the Zaida-Isabel story the benefit of the doubt, the line leads, eight generations later, to Isabel's descendant Maria de Padilla (though it does encounter yet another potentially fictional character in the process).
De Padilla married another king of Castile and Leon, Peter the Cruel. Their great-great-granddaughter was Queen Isabella, who funded the voyages of Christopher Columbus. Her daughter Juana married a Hapsburg, giving rise to a Medici, a Bourbon and long line of Italian princes and dukes, spreading the Muhammadan line of descent all over Europe.
Finally, 43 generations from Muhammad, you reach an Italian princess named Marina Torlonia.
Her granddaughter is Brooke Shields.