Public Family Trees/Bonaparte/Elizabeth Patterson
1785 - 1879 · Female · Baltimore, Maryland, United States
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Elizabeth Patterson
1785 - 1879
Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (1785-1879), known in Baltimore as Betsy, was the first wife of Jerome Bonaparte and the founder of the American line of the family. The daughter of William Patterson, one of the wealthiest merchants in Maryland, she married Jerome in Baltimore in 1803 while he was serving in the French navy. Napoleon refused to recognise the marriage, barred her from landing in France and had it annulle…
Born1785
The beginning of Elizabeth Patterson's recorded life.
Family
A partnership that connects two branches of the Bonaparte family.
Legacy
A defining role in the story of the Bonaparte family.
Died1879
The close of a life whose connections continue through the family record.
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Gen 1 · 1746 - 1785
Carlo Maria Buonaparte (1746-1785) was a Corsican lawyer from Ajaccio and the father of the imperial House of Bonaparte. Born into a patrician family of the town with earlier Tuscan roots, he studied law at Pisa and first served the Corsican independence leader Pasquale Paoli before accepting French rule after 1769. He married Letizia Ramolino in 1764, and the couple had eight children who survived to adulthood, among them Joseph, Napoleon, Lucien, Elisa, Louis, Pauline, Caroline and Jerome. As a deputy of the Corsican nobility he obtained official recognition of the family's noble status, which allowed his sons free places at French military schools, the opening that set Napoleon on his career. He died at Montpellier in 1785, years before the family's rise.
Gen 1 · 1750 - 1836
Maria Letizia Ramolino (1750-1836) was the mother of Napoleon I and the matriarch of the House of Bonaparte. Born in Ajaccio to a Corsican family of Lombard descent, she married the lawyer Carlo Buonaparte in 1764 and was widowed in 1785, raising their eight surviving children in straitened circumstances. Frugal and famously unimpressed by the family's sudden grandeur, she was given the formal style Madame Mere de l'Empereur under the First Empire and kept her own household at the Hotel de Brienne in Paris. After Waterloo she settled in Rome under papal protection, where she lived until her death in 1836, outliving her son Napoleon by fifteen years and several of her other children.
Gen 2 · 1768 - 1844
Joseph Bonaparte (1768-1844) was the eldest surviving son of Carlo Buonaparte and Letizia Ramolino and the elder brother of Napoleon I. Trained as a lawyer, he served the Republic as a diplomat and negotiated the Treaty of Luneville with Austria and the Treaty of Amiens with Britain. Napoleon made him King of Naples in 1806 and then King of Spain in 1808, a throne he held uneasily through the Peninsular War until 1813. He married Julie Clary in 1794, and their surviving daughters were Zenaide and Charlotte. After the fall of the Empire he lived for many years in the United States, near Bordentown, New Jersey, under the title Comte de Survilliers, returning to Europe late in life and dying in Florence.
Gen 2 · 1775 - 1840
Lucien Bonaparte (1775-1840) was the third surviving son of Carlo Buonaparte and Letizia Ramolino, and the brother whose nerve secured Napoleon's seizure of power. As president of the Council of Five Hundred on 18 Brumaire 1799 he rallied the troops when the deputies turned on his brother, making the coup succeed. He served as interior minister and as ambassador to Spain, but broke with Napoleon over his second marriage, to Alexandrine de Bleschamp, which the Emperor refused to recognise, and over his refusal of a throne. Lucien withdrew to Italy, received the title Prince of Canino and Musignano from the Pope, and was briefly held by the British while trying to sail for America. A collector and amateur archaeologist, he excavated Etruscan tombs on his estates and died at Viterbo in 1840.
Gen 3 · 1781 - 1824
Eugene de Beauharnais (1781-1824) was the son of Josephine de Beauharnais by her first marriage and thus the stepson of Napoleon I, who adopted him as a French prince in 1806. Born in Paris, he served as his stepfather's aide-de-camp in Italy and Egypt and proved the most capable soldier of the imperial family, commanding the Army of Italy and fighting in the Russian campaign of 1812, where he took over the retreating army's rearguard. From 1805 he governed the Kingdom of Italy as Viceroy at Milan, and was widely respected there as an administrator. He married Princess Augusta of Bavaria, and after the Empire fell he settled in Munich as Duke of Leuchtenberg, where he died in 1824. He was the elder brother of Hortense de Beauharnais.
Gen 3 · 1783 - 1837
Hortense de Beauharnais (1783-1837) was the daughter of Josephine de Beauharnais and Alexandre de Beauharnais, the stepdaughter of Napoleon I, and the link between the two imperial generations of this family. Born in Paris, she was married in 1802 to Napoleon's brother Louis Bonaparte and became queen consort of Holland in 1806. Of their three sons, the youngest, Louis Napoleon, became Emperor Napoleon III, so Hortense was at once Napoleon I's stepdaughter, sister-in-law and the mother of his successor. Separated from her husband, she was created Duchesse de Saint-Leu and lived after 1815 in exile at Arenenberg in Switzerland, where she raised her surviving son. An accomplished amateur musician, she wrote romances including Partant pour la Syrie, which became an anthem of the Second Empire.
Gen 4 · 1802 - 1807
Napoleon Charles Bonaparte (1802-1807) was the eldest son of Louis Bonaparte and Hortense de Beauharnais, and so both a nephew and a step-grandson of Napoleon I. Born in Paris in the year his parents married, he was the first child of the next Bonaparte generation and, because Napoleon then had no legitimate son, was widely regarded as the intended heir to the Empire; his uncle was said to be deeply attached to him. He died at The Hague in 1807, aged four, shortly after his parents had become king and queen of Holland. His death pushed Napoleon towards the question of the succession that ended in the annulment of his marriage to Josephine, and left his younger brothers Napoleon Louis and the future Napoleon III as the heirs of this branch.
Gen 4 · 1804 - 1831
Napoleon Louis Bonaparte (1804-1831) was the second son of Louis Bonaparte and Hortense de Beauharnais and the elder brother of Napoleon III. Born in Paris, he was made Grand Duke of Berg by his uncle Napoleon I in 1809, a nominal sovereignty held while he was still a child, and for two days in 1810 he was titular king of Holland after his father's abdication, before the kingdom was annexed to France. Raised in Italy after the Empire fell, he married his cousin Charlotte Bonaparte, a daughter of Joseph Bonaparte, and joined the liberal insurrections against papal rule in the Romagna in 1831. He died at Forli during that campaign, aged twenty-six, leaving his younger brother as the heir of the family's imperial claim.
Gen 5 · 1856 - 1879
Napoleon Eugene Louis Bonaparte (1856-1879), the Prince Imperial, was the only child of Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie and the heir to the Second Empire. His birth at the Tuileries was celebrated across France as securing the dynasty. He accompanied his father to the front in 1870 and was under fire at Saarbrucken at the age of fourteen, weeks before the Empire fell. The family took refuge in England, where he completed his education at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and became, on his father's death in 1873, the Bonapartist claimant recognised by the party in France. Seeking active service, he joined the British forces in the Anglo-Zulu War and was killed in a skirmish in Zululand in June 1879, aged twenty-three. His death passed the family's claim to the descendants of Jerome Bonaparte.
Gen 6 · b. 1950
Prince Charles Napoleon Bonaparte, born in 1950, is the son of Prince Louis Napoleon and a senior living descendant of Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon I's youngest brother. Trained as an economist, he has worked as a consultant and written books on his family and on Napoleonic history, and has been active in local politics in Corsica and in Provence, serving as a municipal councillor and deputy mayor of Ajaccio, the town where the family began. He has helped found associations that promote Napoleonic heritage sites across Europe. His father's will named his son Jean-Christophe rather than him as head of the house, a decision he has publicly disputed, and Bonapartist opinion has been divided between them since 1997. His children with Princess Beatrice of Bourbon-Two Sicilies are Caroline and Jean-Christophe.
Gen 7 · b. 1986
Jean-Christophe, Prince Napoleon, born in 1986, is the current head of the House of Bonaparte and the senior representative of Napoleon I's family today. The son of Prince Charles Napoleon and Princess Beatrice of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, he was named heir in the will of his grandfather Prince Louis Napoleon, who died in 1997 and passed over his own son, a decision that has been contested within the family. He studied at HEC Paris and took an MBA at Harvard Business School, and has worked in private equity and investment banking in London and Paris. He takes part in Napoleonic commemorations in France and abroad, including the bicentenary observances of 2021. In 2019 he married Countess Olympia von und zu Arco-Zinneberg at Les Invalides in Paris, where Napoleon I is buried.
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 Belgian royal family, formally the House of Belgium and dynastically a branch of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, is the reigning family of Belgium, founded when the German prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld accepted the throne of the newly independent kingdom in 1831 and continuing today through King Philippe and his heir, Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant. Belgium became independent from the Netherlands in 1830 and chose a constitutional monarchy. Its National Congress looked abroad for a sovereign who could balance French and British interests, and settled on Leopold, a widowed, well-connected and famously cautious prince who had already turned down the crown of Greece. He took the constitutional oath on 21 July 1831, still the Belgian national day. Seven monarchs have reigned since: Leopold I, Leopold II, Albert I, Leopold III, Baudouin, Albert II and Philippe. ## Origins The dynasty's roots are in the small Thuringian duchy of Saxe-Coburg, whose princes married into half the thrones of nineteenth-century Europe. Leopold I was the uncle of both Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, and his second marriage, to Louise-Marie of Orleans, daughter of the French king Louis Philippe I, tied the new kingdom to Paris as well as London. The crown did not pass in a straight line: Leopold II's only son died at the age of nine, so the succession moved to Leopold II's brother Philippe, Count of Flanders, and then to Philippe's son, Albert I. Every Belgian monarch since 1909 descends from that collateral branch. ## Notable members Leopold II is the most studied and most criticised figure in the family, remembered for the industrial boom and monumental building of his reign and, above all, for his personal rule over the Congo Free State. Albert I and Queen Elisabeth of Bavaria became wartime symbols of Belgian resistance behind the Yser in 1914. Leopold III's surrender in 1940 and his conduct under occupation triggered the political crisis known as the Royal Question and ended in his abdication. Baudouin reigned for 42 years and presided over Congolese independence and Belgium's transformation into a federal state. Daughters of the house carried its blood outward: Charlotte became Empress Carlota of Mexico, Marie-Jose was the last Queen of Italy, and Josephine-Charlotte was Grand Duchess of Luxembourg. ## Significance In a country divided by language, the monarchy has been the one institution claimed by both Flemish and Walloon Belgians, and the king's role in brokering coalition governments remains politically real rather than ceremonial. The family has also changed with the country: equal succession was introduced in 1991, making Princess Elisabeth the first female Duchess of Brabant and the future first queen regnant of the Belgians, and in 2020 a court recognised Delphine of Saxe-Coburg as a daughter of Albert II. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Dynasty | House of Belgium (Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) | | Country | Kingdom of Belgium | | Founder | Leopold I, King of the Belgians (1790-1865) | | Reigning since | 21 July 1831 | | Monarchs to date | Seven, from Leopold I to Philippe | | Current head | King Philippe (born 1960), reigning since 2013 | | Heir apparent | Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant (born 2001) | | Principal residences | Royal Palace of Brussels, Castle of Laeken | | Motto | L'union fait la force / Eendracht maakt macht |
The House of Tudor was the royal family that ruled England and Wales from 1485 to 1603, founded by Henry VII after his victory at Bosworth Field and ending with the death of his granddaughter Elizabeth I. In five reigns the dynasty took England out of the Roman Catholic church, made the monarch the head of a national religion, and turned a peripheral kingdom into a naval and literary power. This tree follows the line from the Welsh courtier Owen Tudor and the dowager queen Catherine of Valois down to Elizabeth I, together with the Brandon, Grey and Clifford cousins and the Scottish line that ended in James VI and I. ## Origins The family name comes from Penmynydd in Anglesey, north Wales, where the Tudors were landed gentry in the service of the princes of Gwynedd. Owen Tudor came to the English court in the 1420s and married Catherine of Valois, the widow of Henry V. Their sons Edmund and Jasper Tudor were half-brothers of Henry VI, who raised them to earldoms in 1452. Edmund's marriage to Lady Margaret Beaufort, a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, added the senior Lancastrian claim to the throne, and their only child, born after his father's death, became Henry VII. His marriage to Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV, joined the two houses whose rivalry had driven the Wars of the Roses and gave the dynasty its red and white rose. ## Notable members Henry VII rebuilt the crown's finances and secured the new dynasty through marriage alliances with Spain and Scotland. Henry VIII married six times and broke with Rome, and his three surviving children each reigned in turn: Edward VI as a Protestant boy king, Mary I as the first queen to rule England in her own right, and Elizabeth I for forty-four years. Around them stand the cousins who carried royal blood without the crown, among them Lady Jane Grey, queen for nine days, her sisters Catherine and Mary Grey, and Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, one of the last Plantagenets. ## The Scottish and Suffolk lines Henry VII's daughters carried the blood outward. Margaret Tudor married James IV of Scotland, and her line runs through James V and Mary, Queen of Scots, to James VI and I, who inherited England in 1603. Mary Tudor married Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, and their daughters Frances and Eleanor Brandon produced the Grey and Clifford claimants whom Henry VIII's will preferred over the Scottish descendants of his elder sister. ## Significance No English dynasty changed the country more in so few generations. The Tudors created the Church of England, absorbed the wealth of the monasteries into the crown, brought Wales formally into the English legal and parliamentary system, and built the navy that met the Spanish Armada. The Elizabethan settlement shaped English religion for centuries, and the Elizabethan decades produced Shakespeare, Spenser and the first English voyages to the Americas. When Elizabeth I died unmarried in 1603, the throne passed peacefully to her Scottish cousin, and the two crowns were joined in one person for the first time. | Fact | Details | |---|---| | Origin | Penmynydd, Anglesey, Wales | | Ruled | England, Wales and Ireland, 1485 to 1603 | | Founder | Owen Tudor, through his son Edmund Tudor | | Monarchs | Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I | | Emblem | The Tudor rose, red and white combined | | Principal seats | Richmond, Greenwich, Hampton Court and Whitehall palaces | | Ended | Death of Elizabeth I in 1603, succeeded by James VI of Scotland |
Elizabeth Patterson has 1 recorded child: Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte.
Elizabeth Patterson married Jerome Bonaparte.
Elizabeth Patterson is recorded as Baltimore socialite in the Bonaparte family tree.
Elizabeth Patterson's recorded native place is Baltimore, Maryland, United States.
Elizabeth Patterson is recorded as Napoleon Bonaparte's Sister-in-law.
Elizabeth Patterson is recorded in the Bonaparte family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 38 other people.
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