Public Family Trees/Bernadotte/Wilhelm Bernadotte
1884 - 1965 · Male · Stockholm, Sweden
Son of Gustaf V Bernadotte and Victoria of Baden
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Generation
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Ancestors
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Descendants
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Children
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Marriages
Prince Wilhelm, Duke of Sodermanland, born in 1884, was the second son of Gustaf V and Victoria of Baden and had a long career as a writer. A naval officer by training, he published poetry, essays and travel books, and was an early documentary film maker whose expeditions to Africa and Asia in the 1920s and 1930s produced both films and popular accounts of them. He married Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia in 19…
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Died1965
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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 4 · 1861 - 1951
Prince Carl, Duke of Vastergotland, born in 1861, was the third son of Oscar II and Sophia of Nassau and a cavalry general in the Swedish army. He is remembered chiefly for humanitarian work: as chairman of the Swedish Red Cross for more than four decades he organised prisoner of war exchanges and relief transports through the First World War and famine relief in Russia, and the organisation grew into a major institution under him. In 1897 he married Princess Ingeborg of Denmark. Their daughters married into three royal houses, which made him a grandfather of Harald V of Norway and Albert II of Belgium. He died in 1951 at the age of ninety.
Gen 4 · 1865 - 1947
Prince Eugen, Duke of Narke, born in 1865, was the youngest son of Oscar II and Sophia of Nassau and one of Sweden's most important landscape painters. Trained in Paris, he worked in a national romantic style, and canvases such as The Old Castle and The Cloud are fixtures of Swedish art history; he also painted large public murals, including work for Stockholm City Hall. He never married, and built his home, Waldemarsudde on Djurgarden in Stockholm, into a studio and a major private collection of contemporary Swedish art, which he left to the nation at his death in 1947. It is now a public museum, and he is remembered as the Painter Prince.
Gen 5 · 1901 - 1954
Princess Martha of Sweden was born in Stockholm in 1901, the second daughter of Prince Carl, Duke of Vastergotland, and Princess Ingeborg of Denmark. In 1929 she married her first cousin Olav, crown prince of Norway, and became a popular crown princess in Oslo. When Germany invaded Norway in 1940 she took her three children to the United States, where she lived at the invitation of President Franklin Roosevelt, campaigned publicly for the Norwegian cause and became an effective voice for the occupied country. She returned to Norway in 1945 but died in 1954, three years before her husband became King Olav V. She was the mother of Harald V.
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 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.
The Rothschilds are a European banking dynasty founded in Frankfurt am Main by Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), whose five sons established banking houses in Frankfurt, Vienna, Naples, London and Paris and together built the most powerful private financial network of the nineteenth century. ## Origins Mayer Amschel Rothschild was born in 1744 in the Judengasse, the walled Jewish street of Frankfurt am Main, where the family took its name from the red shield that had marked an ancestor's house. He began as a dealer in rare coins and medals, became court factor to Crown Prince Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel in 1769, and turned that position into a banking business handling loans, bullion and government paper. With his wife Gutle Schnapper he had ten children who reached adulthood, five sons and five daughters. ## The five houses Mayer Amschel's decisive act was to place his sons in five cities so that the family could move money and news across borders as a single firm. Amschel Mayer stayed in Frankfurt, Salomon went to Vienna, Nathan to London, Carl to Naples and James to Paris. The brothers financed the allied campaigns against Napoleon, then the governments, railways and industries of nineteenth century Europe. The Naples house closed in 1860 with Italian unification, Frankfurt in 1901 for want of an heir, and Vienna in 1938 after the Anschluss. London and Paris survived, and their successors trade today as Rothschild and Co and the Edmond de Rothschild Group. ## Notable members Nathan Mayer Rothschild founded N M Rothschild and Sons and made London the centre of international lending. His son Lionel broke the bar on Jews sitting in Parliament, taking his Commons seat in 1858, and his grandson Nathan Mayer became the first Jewish member of the House of Lords in 1885. James Mayer de Rothschild dominated French finance under three regimes and bought Chateau Lafite, while his son Edmond funded the first Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. The family also produced naturalists and collectors rather than only bankers: Walter, 2nd Baron Rothschild, the zoologist to whom the Balfour Declaration was addressed in 1917; his brother Charles, the flea specialist who founded British nature conservation; Charles's daughter Dame Miriam Rothschild, a Fellow of the Royal Society; and another daughter, Nica, the patron of Thelonious Monk. Jacob, 4th Baron Rothschild, built RIT Capital Partners and chaired the trustees of the National Gallery. ## Significance The Rothschilds were the first banking family to operate as a genuinely international partnership, and for much of the nineteenth century they were the principal lenders to European states. Their name is attached to railways, mines, hospitals, museums, nature reserves, Bordeaux first growths and a long tradition of Jewish philanthropy. Repeated marriages between first cousins kept capital and control inside the family, which is why the branches of this tree cross back into one another so often. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Founder | Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812) | | Matriarch | Gutle Schnapper (1753-1849) | | Origin | The Judengasse, Frankfurt am Main | | Children of the founder | Ten, five sons and five daughters | | The five houses | Frankfurt, Vienna, Naples, London, Paris | | Motto | Concordia, Integritas, Industria | | Principal firms | N M Rothschild and Sons, de Rothschild Freres, S. M. von Rothschild | | Still active today | Rothschild and Co, Edmond de Rothschild Group | | Known for | Government finance, railways, wine estates, natural history, art collections, philanthropy |
The House of Glücksburg is the reigning royal house of Denmark and Norway and the former royal house of Greece, a branch of the ancient House of Oldenburg whose modern members all descend from King Christian IX of Denmark (1818 to 1906) and his wife Louise of Hesse-Kassel. Through the marriages of their six children, a minor ducal family from the Danish-German borderland became the common ancestor of monarchs in Copenhagen, Oslo and Athens, of a British queen consort, of a Russian empress, and of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. ## Origins The house takes its name from Glücksburg, a small castle town in Schleswig, and belongs to the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg line of the House of Oldenburg, which had held the Danish throne since 1448. Christian IX was a prince of that cadet branch with no expectation of ruling until the childless Frederik VII made the Danish succession an open European question. Christian succeeded him in 1863, and within months his second son was elected King of the Hellenes as George I, planting the family in Greece for 110 years. In 1905 his grandson Prince Carl of Denmark accepted the Norwegian throne as Haakon VII, giving Norway its own dynasty after centuries of union with Denmark and then Sweden. ## Notable members Christian IX was nicknamed the father-in-law of Europe: his daughter Alexandra married Edward VII of the United Kingdom, and his daughter Dagmar became Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia, mother of Nicholas II. The Danish line runs through Christian X, Frederik IX and Queen Margrethe II, a trained archaeologist and illustrator who reigned from 1972 until her abdication in 2024, to her son King Frederik X and Queen Mary. The Norwegian line runs from Haakon VII and Queen Maud through Olav V, an Olympic sailing champion, to King Harald V and Crown Prince Haakon. The Greek line produced Constantine I, Paul, Constantine II and Queen Anne-Marie, Queen SofÃa of Spain, and Prince Andrew's son Philip, consort to Elizabeth II for 73 years. ## Significance No other western dynasty connects as many surviving monarchies in a single documented lineage. Two of Europe's ten reigning royal families, Denmark and Norway, are Glücksburg in the male line, and the house also sits in the ancestry of the British and Spanish royal families. Its history traces the transformation of European monarchy itself: from the dynastic matchmaking of the 1860s, through the loss of the Russian and Greek thrones, to the constitutional, publicly accountable monarchies of modern Scandinavia. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | House name | Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, a branch of the House of Oldenburg | | Founding figure of the modern house | Christian IX of Denmark (1818 to 1906) | | Ancestral seat | Glücksburg Castle, Schleswig | | Thrones held | Denmark (1863 to present), Greece (1863 to 1973), Norway (1905 to present) | | Current heads of state | Frederik X of Denmark, Harald V of Norway | | Best-known member abroad | Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921 to 2021) | | Nickname of its founder | The father-in-law of Europe |
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 |
Wilhelm Bernadotte's recorded parents are Gustaf V Bernadotte, Victoria of Baden.
Wilhelm Bernadotte has 1 recorded child: Lennart Bernadotte.
Wilhelm Bernadotte married Maria Pavlovna of Russia.
Wilhelm Bernadotte has 1 recorded sibling: Gustaf VI Adolf Bernadotte.
Wilhelm Bernadotte is recorded as Prince of Sweden, Duke of Sodermanland; writer and film maker in the Bernadotte family tree.
Wilhelm Bernadotte's recorded native place is Stockholm, Sweden.
8 ancestors and 1 descendant of Wilhelm Bernadotte are recorded so far, within a tree of 43 people.
Wilhelm Bernadotte is recorded as Charles XIV John Bernadotte's Great-Great-Grandson.
Wilhelm Bernadotte is recorded in the Bernadotte family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 42 other people.
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