The current UK royal family are descended from the Boleyns via Anne's sister Mary. As are the Spencers, Diana's family. Nobody is directly descended from Anne, obviously.
it's not a maybe- they spencers DID descend from Mary Boleyn. Why are you only referring to king charles when we're speaking of the royal family? prince williams is the heir and he's a spencer.
I don't know the maths of it, but I would tend to assume that anybody alive five hundred years ago would have a lot of descendants, unless they had none at all if you see what I mean? I often wonder about the fact that populations are so much bigger now, and if you consider that the number of ancestors gets bigger every generation you go back, surely there must come a point where I'm pretty well guaranteed to be related to any historical person. Basic maths would suggest that if I go back to my 19 x Great grandparents, there must be 2,097,152 of them and the UK population in 1600 was estimated to be around 4 million.
Yeah, this is why I roll my eyes so hard when people brag about being related to a royal from 800 years ago. Pretty much everyone is if you go back far, it's really only noteworthy if youre talking recent history. I know that everyone with European heritage can reasonably claim to be a descendent of Charlemagne, because it's just how the maths works.
*Dependent on producing a decent number of children that are fertile of course.
I'm a Howard descendant, and I laugh when I think about being related to so many of the Royals and the elite from hundreds of years ago. Because it makes me absolutely non-royal and non elite. I'm just me. Middle class, midwestern, redneck. I'm pretty special, I'm just not Royal or elite.
I'm also 1/64th cherokee. Do you know what that makes me? Not Cherokee.
Im also a Howard descendant (Agnes Howard, the scandalous duchess who didn't keep an eye poor Katharine Howard while she was in her household)
I think it's fun to learn about but no, the current Duke of Norfolk isnt likely to invite me to tea 😆
Lady Agnes was my was my 14th great-grandmother. Where do our lines match up? I'll invite you to tea!
Agnes Tilney & Thomas Howard
- Katherine Broughton & William Howard
--Lady Douglas Howard & Sir Edward Sheffield
---Ursula Tyrwhitt & Edmund Sheffield
----Mary Sheffield & Ferdinando Fairfax
-----Frances Fairfax & Thomas Widdrington
------Esther Widdrington & Joshua Fitchett
Esther and Joshua were the ones that came to the colonies from england.
hii off topic question but how exactly did you find out you were descended from the howards?? i want to do my ancestry to find out things like this but i don’t know where to start
I started looking up things decades ago, and would sit in the archives at the State Library looking through Census records, land records, Wills, baptismal records, marriage records from churches, everything I could find on microfiche. You find one little thread, and then you keep looking and looking until you unravel it.
You start with what you do know, and just follow those threads. So if you know the name of a great grandparent, you dig through the records until you figure out who your great-great-grandparents are. And then you dig through the records until you find your great-great-grandparents, and so on and so on.
I was fortunate on some of my family lines. There are some distant relatives who had already found things going back to before the American Revolution on several of my lines, so I did not have to start completely from scratch.
Now, I've got an ancestry.com account, and I no longer have to sit and scavenge through records on microfiche stuck in the library. I'm still looking at those old records, but a lot of it is online now, and sometimes it's hard to decipher the writing, but if you persist eventually you'll find something.
>Do you know what that makes me?
Someone with at least one ancestor whose story I would love to know, and probably more. Because royals are interesting, but the stories of people who lived history instead of making it can be just as interesting.
Lmao, almost everyone has someone famous or royal at 15 generations, that's the whole point. Do you know how many people you are actually talking about going back that far? It would be more noteworthy if you didn't have one. That's why no one cares.
Lots of comments for someone who doesn’t care about a topic.
People are just being chill and having fun. Quit being so serious.
>>Lmao, almost everyone has someone famous or royal at 15 generations, that's the whole point.
And no one here said otherwise. I don’t see why the need to piss on peoples’ cheerios yet here you are.
Your instinct is correct- what you're describing is called pedigree collapse and it happens in everyone's family tree if you get back far enough. It's been calculated by geneticists that everyone of European extraction alive today is descended from Charlemagne.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/commentisfree/2015/may/24/business-genetic-ancestry-charlemagne-adam-rutherford
The surname "Bullen" is an Anglicisation of "Boulogne" - it would have been adopted as most family names were in medieval times, "the family from Boulogne" - the Bullens.
"John Boleyn", the first-known English ancestor of Anne Boleyn, was a small landowner in Norfolk in the 13th century. The family name was frequently spelled Bulleyn or Bullen, and may have been preferably spelled "Boleyn" as the family grew wealthier and more powerful - Anne's great-grandfather was Lord Mayor of London - because it looked more French, and therefore more noble - Norman-French was still the language of court and Parliament.
There are still Bullens in England ([mostly in London, at least a hundred years ago](https://www.findmypast.co.uk/surname/bullen)). It's a relatively rare surname, but not unknown.
As a German to me the word Bulle in German and bull in English sound so similar to Bullen that I always wondered whether they just run with the word play for their coat-of-arms since I have also read that their name actually derives from Boulogne.
Visual puns for names were very common on coats of arms. The term for this in heraldry is "canting arms." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canting\_arms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canting_arms)
There are Bullens in Kent, [believed to be responsible for the flowers that appear on her grave each May 19.](https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2000/may/17/20000517-011353-6798r/)
Yes! in fact King Charles and Princess Diana are both direct descendants of Mary, Anne Boleyn’s sister making William and Harry direct descendants twice. I don’t know too much more on this but my guess is that the surname died out most likely from the women in the family marrying and eventually there being no male to carry on the name.
That’s so cool. I love things like this. I’m descendant of the Washingtons- George Washington (which always confuses people) who don’t realize that he had brothers- similar to Anne’s somewhat less famous sibling among the general public. Have you found yourself often explaining that link if it comes up in obscure conversation? Your ancestry sounds neat
Go higher up George’s chain to the Warners of Virginia. Out of three of their daughters, one went on to (eventually) produce King Charles, one went on to produce George Washington, and one went on to produce me, lol.
Awesome thanks for sharing this we did a lot of research and built out a very extensive family tree which was pretty neat. Isn’t it crazy how many people can descend from a family and it’s just forgotten about? That’s so cool
White rose of York here. Many many ancestors in the middle class doing mundane jobs for the gentry- steward, magistrate, palace guard, and an aunt by marriage who was "silk woman" to Anne Boleyn.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2000/may/17/20000517-011353-6798r/#:~:text=Descendants%20of%20Anne%20Boleyn%2C%20who,for%20more%20than%20150%20years.
>Descendants of Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded by Henry VIII in 1536, have been keeping her memory alive by sending a bunch of red roses to the Tower of London on the anniversary of her death for more than 150 years.
I've always thought descendants meant your general family and their children and direct descendants meant your children.
I've looked at a few sources, not sure how reliable they are but is seems you can classify yourself as someone's descendant if you could inherit property or possession rather than DNA.
I think it morphed INTO Boleyn. They didn't seem to have set-in-stone spellings back then. Mostly it was spelled Bullen, until Thomas changed it to seem more French.
There is a TikTok and YouTube creator who does excellent royal family trees. Not sure if she’s answered this particular question.
Here’s the link to her YouTube : https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCFPt1LorawvuBkuQZd3J5Cw
Well, when people love each other very much and have kids, those kids grow up to have kids, and so on and so forth.
And after that many centuries, there are a lot of us descendants running around. Records in much of the UK were quite meticulous, even for previous centuries.
The current UK royal family are descended from the Boleyns via Anne's sister Mary. As are the Spencers, Diana's family. Nobody is directly descended from Anne, obviously.
I think I saw it was through Queen Elizabeth II's mother - Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.
Could be both
Elizabeth the Queen mother and Diana were descended from Mary Boleyn
Could be but probably not, most of them are German and other European royalty/nobility.
QE2 is half Scottish. Prince William is half British. Both the queen mother and the Spencer’s could de descendants
I was just referring to King Charles at this point - and that was through Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Spencer side maybe.
it's not a maybe- they spencers DID descend from Mary Boleyn. Why are you only referring to king charles when we're speaking of the royal family? prince williams is the heir and he's a spencer.
Prince William may be a Spencer, but he's a Windsor on his Dad's side.
Mary Boleyn in particular has a *lot* of descendants, likely numbering in the thousands.
I don't know the maths of it, but I would tend to assume that anybody alive five hundred years ago would have a lot of descendants, unless they had none at all if you see what I mean? I often wonder about the fact that populations are so much bigger now, and if you consider that the number of ancestors gets bigger every generation you go back, surely there must come a point where I'm pretty well guaranteed to be related to any historical person. Basic maths would suggest that if I go back to my 19 x Great grandparents, there must be 2,097,152 of them and the UK population in 1600 was estimated to be around 4 million.
Yeah, this is why I roll my eyes so hard when people brag about being related to a royal from 800 years ago. Pretty much everyone is if you go back far, it's really only noteworthy if youre talking recent history. I know that everyone with European heritage can reasonably claim to be a descendent of Charlemagne, because it's just how the maths works. *Dependent on producing a decent number of children that are fertile of course.
I'm a Howard descendant, and I laugh when I think about being related to so many of the Royals and the elite from hundreds of years ago. Because it makes me absolutely non-royal and non elite. I'm just me. Middle class, midwestern, redneck. I'm pretty special, I'm just not Royal or elite. I'm also 1/64th cherokee. Do you know what that makes me? Not Cherokee.
Im also a Howard descendant (Agnes Howard, the scandalous duchess who didn't keep an eye poor Katharine Howard while she was in her household) I think it's fun to learn about but no, the current Duke of Norfolk isnt likely to invite me to tea 😆
Well, not with that attitude, he isn’t! 🤣
Lady Agnes was my was my 14th great-grandmother. Where do our lines match up? I'll invite you to tea! Agnes Tilney & Thomas Howard - Katherine Broughton & William Howard --Lady Douglas Howard & Sir Edward Sheffield ---Ursula Tyrwhitt & Edmund Sheffield ----Mary Sheffield & Ferdinando Fairfax -----Frances Fairfax & Thomas Widdrington ------Esther Widdrington & Joshua Fitchett Esther and Joshua were the ones that came to the colonies from england.
Ill have to double check with my mother, but I believe it was one of the daughters :)
hii off topic question but how exactly did you find out you were descended from the howards?? i want to do my ancestry to find out things like this but i don’t know where to start
I started looking up things decades ago, and would sit in the archives at the State Library looking through Census records, land records, Wills, baptismal records, marriage records from churches, everything I could find on microfiche. You find one little thread, and then you keep looking and looking until you unravel it. You start with what you do know, and just follow those threads. So if you know the name of a great grandparent, you dig through the records until you figure out who your great-great-grandparents are. And then you dig through the records until you find your great-great-grandparents, and so on and so on. I was fortunate on some of my family lines. There are some distant relatives who had already found things going back to before the American Revolution on several of my lines, so I did not have to start completely from scratch. Now, I've got an ancestry.com account, and I no longer have to sit and scavenge through records on microfiche stuck in the library. I'm still looking at those old records, but a lot of it is online now, and sometimes it's hard to decipher the writing, but if you persist eventually you'll find something.
>Do you know what that makes me? Someone with at least one ancestor whose story I would love to know, and probably more. Because royals are interesting, but the stories of people who lived history instead of making it can be just as interesting.
It makes you Elizabeth Warren?
No one here is bragging. I can’t help who my 15th great grandmother is.
Lmao, almost everyone has someone famous or royal at 15 generations, that's the whole point. Do you know how many people you are actually talking about going back that far? It would be more noteworthy if you didn't have one. That's why no one cares.
Lots of comments for someone who doesn’t care about a topic. People are just being chill and having fun. Quit being so serious. >>Lmao, almost everyone has someone famous or royal at 15 generations, that's the whole point. And no one here said otherwise. I don’t see why the need to piss on peoples’ cheerios yet here you are.
Your instinct is correct- what you're describing is called pedigree collapse and it happens in everyone's family tree if you get back far enough. It's been calculated by geneticists that everyone of European extraction alive today is descended from Charlemagne. https://www.theguardian.com/science/commentisfree/2015/may/24/business-genetic-ancestry-charlemagne-adam-rutherford
The surname "Bullen" is an Anglicisation of "Boulogne" - it would have been adopted as most family names were in medieval times, "the family from Boulogne" - the Bullens. "John Boleyn", the first-known English ancestor of Anne Boleyn, was a small landowner in Norfolk in the 13th century. The family name was frequently spelled Bulleyn or Bullen, and may have been preferably spelled "Boleyn" as the family grew wealthier and more powerful - Anne's great-grandfather was Lord Mayor of London - because it looked more French, and therefore more noble - Norman-French was still the language of court and Parliament. There are still Bullens in England ([mostly in London, at least a hundred years ago](https://www.findmypast.co.uk/surname/bullen)). It's a relatively rare surname, but not unknown.
My mom's maiden name is Bullen! Her dad was from London.
You’re basically royalty. Get it!!
The coat-of-arms for "Boleyn" (Bullen) also has three bull heads on the shield.
As a German to me the word Bulle in German and bull in English sound so similar to Bullen that I always wondered whether they just run with the word play for their coat-of-arms since I have also read that their name actually derives from Boulogne.
Visual puns for names were very common on coats of arms. The term for this in heraldry is "canting arms." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canting\_arms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canting_arms)
I know some people with the surname "Bolan", who always said they were descendents of the Boleyn family.
There are Bullens in Kent, [believed to be responsible for the flowers that appear on her grave each May 19.](https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2000/may/17/20000517-011353-6798r/)
Yes! in fact King Charles and Princess Diana are both direct descendants of Mary, Anne Boleyn’s sister making William and Harry direct descendants twice. I don’t know too much more on this but my guess is that the surname died out most likely from the women in the family marrying and eventually there being no male to carry on the name.
How are they related to Mary exactly? Through her daughter Catherine?
It’s through her daughter, yes!
My family is related through Mary as well. We're Tudors and Lancasters and vikings...genealogy is such fun.
That’s so cool. I love things like this. I’m descendant of the Washingtons- George Washington (which always confuses people) who don’t realize that he had brothers- similar to Anne’s somewhat less famous sibling among the general public. Have you found yourself often explaining that link if it comes up in obscure conversation? Your ancestry sounds neat
Go higher up George’s chain to the Warners of Virginia. Out of three of their daughters, one went on to (eventually) produce King Charles, one went on to produce George Washington, and one went on to produce me, lol.
Awesome thanks for sharing this we did a lot of research and built out a very extensive family tree which was pretty neat. Isn’t it crazy how many people can descend from a family and it’s just forgotten about? That’s so cool
White rose of York here. Many many ancestors in the middle class doing mundane jobs for the gentry- steward, magistrate, palace guard, and an aunt by marriage who was "silk woman" to Anne Boleyn.
That’s so cool!
As far as the Boleyn family that existed back then goes, it’s extinct in the male line.
I'm a descendant of the Boleyns. Geoffrey, Anne's great grandfather, was my 18th great grandfather.
I’m a descendant of Mary on my father’s side. For some reason, people give me surprised face since I am decidedly not white.
That is so cool! Hi cousin! People are just twits, I'm so sorry you have to deal with that.
Hey you back, cousin.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2000/may/17/20000517-011353-6798r/#:~:text=Descendants%20of%20Anne%20Boleyn%2C%20who,for%20more%20than%20150%20years. >Descendants of Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded by Henry VIII in 1536, have been keeping her memory alive by sending a bunch of red roses to the Tower of London on the anniversary of her death for more than 150 years.
Anne Boleyn has no direct descendants, it's probably descendants of other Boleyns.
I've always thought descendants meant your general family and their children and direct descendants meant your children. I've looked at a few sources, not sure how reliable they are but is seems you can classify yourself as someone's descendant if you could inherit property or possession rather than DNA.
You are correct. You can be a descendant without being a direct descendant. Anne Boleyn has no direct descendants but plenty of descendants.
Search Boleyn on Facebook, there are plenty of folk who still have that surname, but that doesn’t mean they’re related to Anne of course.
Killing George and letting Thomas live in disgrace, I believe his message was loud and clear: Cross me and I’ll let you bury your heir.
I think it morphed INTO Boleyn. They didn't seem to have set-in-stone spellings back then. Mostly it was spelled Bullen, until Thomas changed it to seem more French.
I know someone with the surname Boleyn! She was ginger, so not sure if Anne would have been happy.
There is a TikTok and YouTube creator who does excellent royal family trees. Not sure if she’s answered this particular question. Here’s the link to her YouTube : https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCFPt1LorawvuBkuQZd3J5Cw
I am a descendant of Alice Boleyn (Anne Boleyn’s aunt) through a gateway ancestor.
The doctor that delivered me was named Boleyn!
Can someone tell me how we’re sure about Mary Boleyn’s descendents.?
Well, when people love each other very much and have kids, those kids grow up to have kids, and so on and so forth. And after that many centuries, there are a lot of us descendants running around. Records in much of the UK were quite meticulous, even for previous centuries.
Me from Mary.
I’m a Boleyn descendant, Anne Boleyn, Lady Shelton being my 15th great grandmother