Public Family Trees/Bernadotte/Sophia of Nassau
1836 - 1913 · Female · Biebrich, Nassau, Germany
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Generation
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Ancestors
24
Descendants
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Children
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Marriages
Sophia of Nassau was born at Biebrich on the Rhine in 1836, the youngest daughter of Duke William of Nassau, and married the future Oscar II in 1857, becoming queen of Sweden and Norway in 1872. Intelligent, strong willed and deeply religious, she took a serious interest in nursing and in 1884 founded Sophiahemmet, the Stockholm nursing school and hospital that still carries her name. Her brother Adolphe became Grand…
Born1836
The beginning of Sophia of Nassau's recorded life.
Family
A partnership that connects two branches of the Bernadotte family.
Next Generation
4 children recorded in this branch.
Legacy
A defining role in the story of the Bernadotte family.
Died1913
The close of a life whose connections continue through the family record.
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Gen 1 · 1763 - 1844
Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte was born in 1763 in Pau in south western France, the son of a provincial lawyer, and rose through the revolutionary French army to become a Marshal of the Empire under Napoleon and Prince of Pontecorvo. In 1810 the Swedish Riksdag, looking for an heir for the childless Charles XIII, elected him crown prince of Sweden; he took the name Charles John and converted to Lutheranism. He succeeded to the thrones of Sweden and Norway in 1818 as Charles XIV John and reigned until his death in 1844, founding the House of Bernadotte, which reigns in Sweden to this day. With his wife Desideria, born Desiree Clary, he had one son, the future Oscar I.
Gen 1 · 1777 - 1860
Desiree Clary, who reigned as Queen Desideria, was born in Marseille in 1777, the daughter of a wealthy silk merchant. In her youth she was engaged to the young Napoleon Bonaparte, and her sister Julie married his brother Joseph; in 1798 she married General Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, and their only child, the future Oscar I, was born in Paris the following year. When her husband was elected crown prince of Sweden she found the northern climate and the formality of the Stockholm court difficult, and lived largely in Paris between 1811 and 1823 before returning for her son's wedding and settling in Sweden for good. She was crowned queen in 1829 and died in Stockholm in 1860.
Gen 2 · 1799 - 1859
Oscar I was born Joseph Francois Oscar Bernadotte in Paris in 1799, the only child of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte and Desiree Clary, and came to Sweden as a boy of eleven when his father was elected crown prince. King of Sweden and Norway from 1844 until his death in 1859, he was the first Bernadotte brought up Swedish, and his reign brought liberal reform: equal inheritance rights for women in 1845, reform of the prison system, which he had studied and written a book about, freer trade, and a cautious sympathy for Scandinavianism. He married Josephine of Leuchtenberg in 1823, and their sons included Charles XV and Oscar II.
Gen 3 · 1826 - 1872
Charles XV was born in Stockholm in 1826, the eldest son of Oscar I and Josephine of Leuchtenberg, and reigned as king of Sweden and Norway from 1859 until his death in 1872. Informal, popular and a gifted amateur painter and poet, he left much of the detail of government to his ministers, and his reign is remembered above all for the reform of 1866 that replaced the ancient Riksdag of the Estates with a two chamber parliament. He married Louise of the Netherlands in 1850; their only surviving child, Louise, became queen of Denmark, so the Swedish throne passed at his death to his younger brother Oscar II.
Gen 6 · 1906 - 1947
Prince Gustaf Adolf, Duke of Vasterbotten, born in 1906, was the eldest son of the future Gustaf VI Adolf and Margaret of Connaught, and from 1950 would have been crown prince of Sweden. A cavalry officer and a notable horseman, he was chairman of the Swedish Olympic Committee, of the national scouting association and of several sports federations, and was widely seen as a capable future king. In 1932 he married Princess Sibylla of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha; they had four daughters and then a son, the future Carl XVI Gustaf, who was nine months old when his father died in January 1947 at the age of forty.
Gen 6 · 1907 - 2002
Sigvard Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg, born in 1907, was the second son of Gustaf VI Adolf and Margaret of Connaught and one of the first members of a European royal family to earn his living as a professional designer. He lost his Swedish royal title in 1934 on marrying Erica Patzek, and was created Count Bernadotte of Wisborg by Luxembourg in 1951. Trained in Stockholm and Munich, he designed silver for Georg Jensen in Copenhagen from 1930 and in 1950 founded the firm Bernadotte and Bjorn with Acton Bjorn, an early industrial design partnership whose work ranged from the Margrethe mixing bowl to typewriters and kitchen appliances. He died in 2002.
Gen 6 · 1909 - 2004
Lennart Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg, was born in 1909, the only child of Prince Wilhelm of Sweden and Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia and a grandson of Gustaf V. He lost his Swedish royal title and succession rights in 1932 by marrying Karin Nissvandt, who was not of royal birth, and was created Count Bernadotte of Wisborg by Luxembourg in 1951. In the same period he took over Mainau, the island in Lake Constance that came to him through his Baden grandmother, Queen Victoria, and spent some sixty years turning it into one of Europe's best known garden estates. He was also a photographer and film maker, and he died at Mainau in 2004.
Gen 7 · b. 1934
Princess Margaretha, Mrs. Ambler, born in 1934, is the eldest child of Prince Gustaf Adolf, Duke of Vasterbotten, and Princess Sibylla of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and the eldest sister of King Carl XVI Gustaf. She grew up at Haga Palace with her three sisters and her much younger brother, and carried out official duties in Sweden as a young princess. In 1964 she married John Ambler, a British businessman, and moved to England, where she has lived ever since, keeping her Swedish title in the style Princess Margaretha, Mrs. Ambler. She is the senior surviving member of her generation of the Swedish royal family.
Gen 7 · 1937 - 2024
Princess Birgitta of Sweden, born in 1937, was the second daughter of Prince Gustaf Adolf, Duke of Vasterbotten, and Princess Sibylla, and a sister of King Carl XVI Gustaf. In 1961 she married Prince Johann Georg of Hohenzollern, and because she married into a royal house she was the only one of the king's four sisters to keep the style of Princess of Sweden as a member of the royal house. She lived in Germany and from the 1980s mainly on Mallorca, where she was a keen golfer and took part in Swedish and German charitable work, returning to Stockholm for family and state occasions. She died in December 2024 at the age of eighty seven.
Gen 7 · b. 1943
Princess Christina, Mrs. Magnuson, born in 1943, is the youngest daughter of Prince Gustaf Adolf, Duke of Vasterbotten, and Princess Sibylla, and the sister closest in age to King Carl XVI Gustaf. She studied art history in Stockholm and at Radcliffe College in the United States, and in the years before her brother married she acted as his official hostess at court, which made her the most publicly visible of the four sisters. In 1974 she married the businessman Tord Magnuson and took the style Princess Christina, Mrs. Magnuson. She has worked for many years as a patron and board member of Swedish charitable and cultural organisations.
Gen 8 · b. 1977
Crown Princess Victoria, Duchess of Vastergotland, born on 14 July 1977, is the eldest child of King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia and the heir apparent to the Swedish throne. She became heir on 1 January 1980, when Sweden became the first monarchy to adopt full absolute primogeniture, moving ahead of her younger brother Carl Philip in the succession. She studied political science and conflict resolution in Sweden and at Yale, trained in diplomacy and in the armed forces, and now carries out a full programme of state and representational duties. In 2010 she married Daniel Westling, created Prince Daniel, Duke of Vastergotland; their children are Princess Estelle and Prince Oscar.
The House of Plantagenet was the royal dynasty that ruled England for 331 years, from the accession of Henry II in 1154 to the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, making it the longest-reigning royal house in English history. Fourteen Plantagenet kings held the throne in unbroken succession, and in the fifteenth century the family's two junior branches, the houses of Lancaster and York, fought each other for the crown in the civil wars later known as the Wars of the Roses. ## Origins The dynasty came from Anjou in western France. Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, is said to have worn a sprig of broom, *planta genista*, in his cap, and from that nickname the family eventually took its name, although it was not used as an actual surname until Richard, 3rd Duke of York, adopted it in the 1440s. Geoffrey's marriage in 1128 to Empress Matilda, daughter and designated heir of Henry I of England, gave their son a claim to the English throne that he made good in 1154. With Normandy and Anjou behind him, and Aquitaine gained through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II ruled lands reaching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees, the assemblage historians call the Angevin Empire. ## Notable members The early, or Angevin, kings are among the most familiar names in English history: Henry II, whose itinerant justices and sworn juries laid the foundations of the common law; Richard the Lionheart, a leading commander of the Third Crusade; and King John, who sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. Henry III rebuilt Westminster Abbey, Edward I conquered Wales and summoned the Model Parliament, and Edward III opened the Hundred Years' War and founded the Order of the Garter. Later generations produced Edward the Black Prince, the victor of Poitiers, Henry V of Agincourt, and Richard III, whose lost grave was rediscovered in Leicester in 2012. ## Lancaster and York Edward III's many sons divided the dynasty. From his third surviving son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, came Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, and, through Gaunt's Beaufort children, Margaret Beaufort and her son Henry VII. From his fourth son, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, combined with the senior Mortimer descent from his second son, Lionel of Antwerp, came Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and his sons Edward IV and Richard III. The rivalry of those branches produced thirty years of intermittent civil war, ending when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at Bosworth and married Elizabeth of York, uniting the red and white roses. ## Significance No other family has shaped English institutions so deeply. Under the Plantagenets, Magna Carta became a settled principle, parliament grew from an occasional royal council into a body whose consent was needed for taxation, the common law took its enduring form, and English displaced French as the language of the court. Their castles, abbeys and cathedrals still define the medieval landscape of England and Wales. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Ruled | England, 1154 to 1485 | | Founder | Henry II, son of Geoffrey V of Anjou and Empress Matilda | | Place of origin | Anjou, France | | Kings | Fourteen, from Henry II to Richard III | | Branches | Angevin, Lancaster, York | | Emblems | The broom flower, the red rose of Lancaster, the white rose of York | | Last king | Richard III, killed at Bosworth in 1485 | | Legacy | Magna Carta, English common law, the growth of parliament |
The House of Stuart was the royal dynasty that ruled Scotland from 1371 and both Scotland and England from 1603 until 1714, giving Britain fourteen monarchs from Robert II to Queen Anne as well as the Jacobite claimants who carried its cause into exile. Spelled Stewart in Scotland and Stuart after Mary, Queen of Scots adopted the French form, the family holds the unusual distinction of having united two crowns by inheritance rather than conquest, and of ending in a disputed succession that reshaped the British constitution. ## Origins The family took its name from its office. The Stewarts were hereditary High Stewards of Scotland, a post granted in the twelfth century to a Breton house settled in Renfrewshire. In 1315 Walter Stewart, 6th High Steward, married Marjorie Bruce, daughter of King Robert the Bruce. Their son became Robert II in 1371 when the direct Bruce line failed, and the stewardship turned into a crown. For more than two centuries afterwards the Stewarts ruled Scotland alone, through a run of reigns cut short by battle, captivity and long royal minorities that left the nobility unusually powerful. ## Notable members James IV, the most cultivated of the Scottish kings, married Margaret Tudor in 1503 and so planted the claim that would carry his descendants to the English throne. His granddaughter Mary, Queen of Scots became queen at six days old, reigned briefly and turbulently, and was deposed in 1567 and executed in England twenty years later. Her son, James VI of Scotland, inherited the English crown in 1603 as James I and became the first monarch to rule both kingdoms. His son Charles I lost the Civil Wars and his throne; Charles II returned at the Restoration in 1660; James II and VII was deposed in the Revolution of 1688, after which his daughters Mary II and Anne reigned in his place. In exile his son James Francis Edward Stuart and grandson Charles Edward Stuart, remembered as Bonnie Prince Charlie, led the Jacobite attempts to recover the throne, ending with the rising of 1745. ## Significance No other British dynasty changed the shape of the state so much. The Stuarts brought Scotland and England under one sovereign, presided over the King James Bible and the theatre of Shakespeare's late career, lost a king to Parliament, and provoked the settlements of 1689 and 1701 that made the monarchy answerable to Parliament and Protestant by statute. When Queen Anne died childless in 1714, the crown passed under the Act of Settlement to the descendants of her cousin Sophia of Hanover, granddaughter of James VI and I, so every British monarch since is still a Stuart descendant. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Founder | Robert II, King of Scots from 1371 | | Ruled | Scotland 1371 to 1714; England and Ireland 1603 to 1714 | | Origin | Renfrewshire, Scotland | | Union of the Crowns | 1603, under James VI of Scotland and I of England | | Last reigning monarch | Anne, Queen of Great Britain, died 1714 | | Jacobite claimants | James Francis Edward, Charles Edward and Henry Benedict Stuart | | Succeeded by | The House of Hanover, through Sophia of Hanover |
The Vanderbilts are an American family who rose from Dutch farming stock on Staten Island to hold the largest private fortune in the United States, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt, known as the Commodore, out of nineteenth century shipping and railroads, and known today for the Gilded Age houses their descendants built and for figures from Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, to the journalist Anderson Cooper. ## Origins on Staten Island The family descends from Jan Aertsen van der Bilt, a Dutch settler who reached New Netherland in the seventeenth century and whose descendants farmed on Staten Island for generations. Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) was born there, the son of a boatman, and began work as a teenager carrying freight across New York Harbour in a single sailing barge. He married his first cousin Sophia Johnson in 1813. ## The railroad fortune Vanderbilt moved from sail to steam, dominated the Hudson River and coastal trade, and after the Civil War turned to railroads, consolidating the New York Central system and building Grand Central Depot. He left almost the whole fortune to one son, William Henry Vanderbilt, who nearly doubled it in eight years before dividing it evenly among his own eight children. They built the family's great houses: The Breakers and Marble House at Newport, Biltmore House in North Carolina, Hyde Park on the Hudson, Florham in New Jersey and Shelburne Farms in Vermont. ## Notable members The third and fourth generations produced Consuelo Vanderbilt, who married the 9th Duke of Marlborough and became a social reformer in England; the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, who died in the sinking of the Lusitania; and Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, who won the America's Cup three times and invented contract bridge. The modern line runs through Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt to the designer Gloria Vanderbilt and her son, the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. ## Significance No American family is more closely identified with the Gilded Age. The Vanderbilts set the pattern for how new industrial wealth was spent, and then for how quickly such a fortune disperses across many heirs. What endures is institutional: Vanderbilt University, the Whitney Museum, and the houses at Newport, Hyde Park, Shelburne and Asheville that are now museums and public estates. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Founder | Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), the Commodore | | Origin | Staten Island, New York, of Dutch descent | | Source of wealth | Steamboat shipping, then the New York Central railroads | | Famous houses | The Breakers, Marble House, Biltmore House, Hyde Park | | Best known members | Consuelo Vanderbilt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Gloria Vanderbilt, Anderson Cooper | | Generations covered | Five, from the Commodore to Anderson Cooper |
The House of Hohenzollern is the German dynasty that ruled Brandenburg from 1415, held the Prussian crown from 1701, and gave Germany its three emperors between 1871 and the fall of the monarchy in 1918. This tree follows the senior Prussian line in one unbroken descent, from Frederick William the Great Elector, through the kings of Prussia and the German Emperors, down to Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia, the present head of the house. ## Origins The family takes its name from Hohenzollern Castle on a hill in the Swabian Alb, where a line of counts is recorded from the eleventh century. A Swabian Zollern married into the burgraviate of Nuremberg in 1192, and the Franconian branch that grew from it spent two centuries accumulating lands and credit with the Holy Roman Emperors. The decisive moment came in 1415, when Emperor Sigismund invested Frederick VI of Nuremberg as Elector of Brandenburg in return for his political and financial support. The Duchy of Prussia, a separate inheritance lying outside the Empire, passed to the Brandenburg electors in 1618, and Frederick William, the Great Elector, welded the two into a single functioning state after the devastation of the Thirty Years' War. ## Notable members Frederick I turned the electorate into a kingdom in 1701. His son Frederick William I, the Soldier King, built the army and the treasury that his own son, **Frederick the Great**, used to seize Silesia and to make Prussia a European power, while also composing music, building Sanssouci and corresponding with Voltaire. **Queen Louise** became the emotional centre of Prussian resistance to Napoleon. **Wilhelm I**, with Otto von Bismarck as his minister president, was proclaimed German Emperor at Versailles in 1871. His son **Frederick III** and the liberal English princess he married, Victoria, daughter of Queen Victoria, reigned for only ninety nine days. **Wilhelm II**, the last Kaiser, abdicated in 1918 and died in Dutch exile in 1941. ## Significance No other German family shaped the modern state so directly. Hohenzollern rulers created the Prussian civil service, compulsory schooling and the general staff, sponsored the Berlin academies and the Humboldt university model, and then used Prussian power to unify Germany around themselves. The monarchy ended with the revolution of November 1918, but the house continues as a private family: the headship passed from Wilhelm II to his eldest son, then to Louis Ferdinand, and in 1994 to Georg Friedrich, whose own father and uncles are part of the succession story told in this tree. ## Quick facts | Fact | Details | |---|---| | Family name | Hohenzollern | | Place of origin | Hohenzollern Castle, Swabia, southern Germany | | Ruled | Brandenburg from 1415, Prussia from 1618, Germany from 1871 | | Royal title | King in Prussia from 1701, King of Prussia from 1772 | | Imperial title | German Emperor, 1871 to 1918 | | German Emperors | Wilhelm I, Frederick III, Wilhelm II | | Monarchy ended | 9 November 1918 | | Present head of the house | Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia, since 1994 | | Principal residences | Berlin City Palace, Sanssouci and Cecilienhof at Potsdam, Charlottenburg | | Branch shown here | The senior Prussian line only, not Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen |
Sophia of Nassau has 4 recorded children: Gustaf V Bernadotte, Oscar Bernadotte, Carl Bernadotte, Eugen Bernadotte.
Sophia of Nassau married Oscar II Bernadotte.
Sophia of Nassau is recorded as Queen of Sweden and Norway in the Bernadotte family tree.
Sophia of Nassau's recorded native place is Biebrich, Nassau, Germany.
0 ancestors and 24 descendants of Sophia of Nassau are recorded so far, within a tree of 43 people.
Sophia of Nassau is recorded as Charles XIV John Bernadotte's Granddaughter's wife.
Sophia of Nassau is recorded in the Bernadotte family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 42 other people.
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