Public Family Trees/Hohenzollern/Frederick William IV of Prussia
1795 - 1861 · Male · Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia
Son of Frederick William III of Prussia and Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz
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Frederick William IV of Prussia
1795 - 1861
Frederick William IV was King of Prussia from 1840 until 1861, the eldest son of Frederick William III and Queen Louise. Born in Berlin in 1795, he was a gifted draughtsman with a passion for architecture who worked closely with Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Friedrich August Stueler on the building of Potsdam and Berlin, and who pressed for the completion of Cologne Cathedral. Romantic and conservative by temperament,…
Born1795
Born to Frederick William III of Prussia, Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
Family
A partnership that connects two branches of the Hohenzollern family.
Legacy
A defining role in the story of the Hohenzollern family.
Died1861
The close of a life whose connections continue through the family record.
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Gen 1 · 1627 - 1667
Louise Henriette of Nassau was Electress of Brandenburg as the first wife of Frederick William, the Great Elector, whom she married in 1646. A daughter of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, and Amalia of Solms-Braunfels, she was raised in the Dutch Republic and brought Netherlandish ideas of land drainage, agriculture and garden design to the sandy country around Berlin. The town of Oranienburg, where she rebuilt a country residence, is named after her family. She wrote hymns in the German Reformed tradition, several of which stayed in use long after her death. Of her children, Frederick I survived to become the first King in Prussia, making her the ancestress of the Prussian royal line. She died in 1667 at the age of thirty nine.
Gen 2 · 1657 - 1713
Frederick I was the first King in Prussia, reigning from 1701 until 1713, having succeeded his father the Great Elector as Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg in 1688. Born at Koenigsberg, he negotiated the Crown Treaty with Emperor Leopold I, promising Prussian troops for the War of the Spanish Succession in exchange for recognition of a royal title, and crowned himself at Koenigsberg on 18 January 1701. His court at Berlin was lavish by Prussian standards. He founded the Academy of Arts and, with his wife Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, the Academy of Sciences, and he built the palace of Charlottenburg. His son Frederick William I and grandson Frederick the Great both reacted against his taste for ceremony and expense.
Gen 3 · 1688 - 1740
Frederick William I, called the Soldier King, was King in Prussia and Elector of Brandenburg from 1713 until 1740. Born in Berlin, the son of Frederick I and Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, he dismantled his father's expensive court, reorganised the administration into the General Directory, introduced compulsory primary schooling and left his heir the best drilled army in Europe together with a full treasury. He was known for his regiment of unusually tall soldiers and for the harsh discipline he imposed on his eldest son, the future Frederick the Great, whose attempt to flee Prussia in 1730 ended in a court martial. With his wife Sophia Dorothea of Hanover he had fourteen children, among them a king of Prussia and a queen of Sweden.
Gen 4 · 1709 - 1758
Wilhelmine of Prussia was Margravine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth and the eldest sister of Frederick the Great, to whom she remained unusually close all her life. Born in Berlin in 1709 to Frederick William I and Sophia Dorothea of Hanover, she married Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth, in 1731 after her mother's plan for a marriage into the British royal family collapsed. At Bayreuth she became a notable patron and builder, responsible for the Hermitage and the Margravial Opera House, and she composed music of her own. Her memoirs are the frankest surviving account of life at her father's court and a principal source for her brother's youth. She died in 1758 during the Seven Years' War.
Gen 4 · 1712 - 1786
Frederick II, known as Frederick the Great, was King in Prussia from 1740 and King of Prussia from 1772 until his death in 1786, and is the most celebrated member of the House of Hohenzollern. Born in Berlin to Frederick William I and Sophia Dorothea of Hanover, he survived a famously brutal upbringing before turning Prussia into a European great power. He seized Silesia from Maria Theresa in the War of the Austrian Succession, held it against Austria, France and Russia through the Seven Years' War, and gained Polish territory in the First Partition of 1772. He was also a flute player and composer, a correspondent of Voltaire, the builder of Sanssouci at Potsdam and the author of the Anti-Machiavel. His marriage to Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick produced no children, so the crown passed to his nephew Frederick William II.
Gen 8 · 1831 - 1888
Frederick III was German Emperor and King of Prussia for ninety nine days in 1888, the shortest reign in the history of his house. Born at Potsdam in 1831, the only son of Wilhelm I and Augusta of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, he studied at Bonn, commanded armies with distinction at Koeniggraetz in 1866 and at Woerth and Sedan in 1870, and was created crown prince of the new empire in 1871. With his wife Victoria, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, he favoured liberal parliamentary government on the British model, which set him at odds with Otto von Bismarck throughout his father's long reign. He was already seriously unwell when he finally succeeded in March 1888, and he died at Potsdam in June, leaving the throne to his eldest son, Wilhelm II.
Gen 9 · 1859 - 1941
Wilhelm II was the last German Emperor and King of Prussia, reigning from 1888 until his abdication in 1918. Born in Berlin in 1859, the eldest son of Frederick III and Victoria, Princess Royal, he was a grandson of both Wilhelm I and Queen Victoria. He dismissed Otto von Bismarck in 1890 and pursued a personal and assertive foreign policy, building a battle fleet that antagonised Britain and backing Austria-Hungary in the crisis of July 1914. His impulsive speeches and interviews repeatedly embarrassed his own governments, and by the later years of the First World War real authority had passed to the army command. He abdicated in November 1918 and spent the rest of his life at Doorn in the Netherlands, where he died in 1941. With Augusta Victoria he had six sons and one daughter.
Gen 9 · 1870 - 1932
Sophia of Prussia was Queen of the Hellenes as the wife of Constantine I of Greece, and a younger daughter of Frederick III and Victoria, Princess Royal. Born at Potsdam in 1870, she married the Greek crown prince in 1889, and her conversion to Greek Orthodoxy caused a lasting breach with her brother Wilhelm II. Her husband's reign was dominated by the National Schism with Eleftherios Venizelos and by the Greek defeat in Asia Minor, and the royal family was driven into exile twice, in 1917 and again in 1922. She worked for hospitals, nursing, soup kitchens and forestry projects in Greece. Three of her sons, George II, Alexander and Paul, became kings of the Hellenes, and her daughter Helen was Queen Mother of Romania. She died at Frankfurt in 1932.
Gen 10 · 1883 - 1942
Prince Eitel Friedrich of Prussia was the second son of Wilhelm II and Augusta Victoria. Born at Potsdam in 1883, he was brought up for the army and commanded the First Regiment of Foot Guards in the First World War, serving on both the Western and Eastern fronts and receiving the order Pour le Merite. In 1906 he married Duchess Sophie Charlotte of Oldenburg; the marriage produced no children and was dissolved in 1926. After the fall of the monarchy he held office in veterans' organisations, including the Stahlhelm league of former front line soldiers, and he lived at Potsdam, in the Villa Ingenheim, where he died in 1942.
Gen 10 · 1887 - 1949
Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, known in the family as Auwi, was the fourth son of Wilhelm II and Augusta Victoria. Born at Potsdam in 1887, he studied law and took a doctorate at Strasbourg, then served in staff appointments during the First World War. In 1908 he married Princess Alexandra Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluecksburg; their son Alexander Ferdinand was born in 1912 and the marriage was dissolved in 1920. He joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and became a senior SA officer and a Prussian state councillor, campaigning for the party in the belief that it would restore the monarchy. He was interned after the Second World War and tried before a denazification court, and he died at Stuttgart in 1949.
Gen 11 · 1909 - 1950
Prince Hubertus of Prussia was the third son of Crown Prince Wilhelm and Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Born at Potsdam in 1909, he trained in agriculture and served as a Luftwaffe officer until 1943, when the regime dismissed members of the former ruling houses from the armed forces. He married Princess Maria Anna von Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg in 1941 and, after that marriage ended, Princess Magdalene Reuss of Koestritz in 1943. Looking for a new life once the family's Silesian estates were lost, he emigrated to South West Africa, where he took up farming near Windhoek. He died there in 1950 at the age of forty, leaving one daughter.
The House of Habsburg was one of the most powerful royal dynasties in European history, ruling Austria from 1282, supplying almost every Holy Roman Emperor between 1438 and the empire's dissolution in 1806, and reigning over Spain and its overseas empire from 1516 to 1700. Named for a castle in what is now Switzerland, the family rose from modest Swabian counts to sovereigns of lands stretching from the Danube to the Andes, and its senior line ended only in 1918 with the fall of Austria-Hungary. ## Origins The dynasty takes its name from Habsburg Castle in the Aargau, in present-day Switzerland, held by a family of counts with scattered lands in Swabia and Alsace. Its fortunes changed in 1273, when the prince-electors chose Rudolf I as King of the Romans after a long interregnum. Rudolf defeated Ottokar II of Bohemia in 1278, took the duchies of Austria and Styria, and granted them to his sons, moving the family's centre of gravity permanently to Vienna. Two centuries later the marriage of Maximilian I to Mary of Burgundy, and of their son Philip the Handsome to Joanna of Castile, converted a regional Alpine power into a continental one within a single generation. ## Notable members Charles V inherited Spain, the Netherlands, Austria, Naples and the Spanish Americas, and on his abdication in 1556 divided them: Spain and the Low Countries to his son Philip II, the Austrian lands and the imperial title to his brother Ferdinand I. The Spanish branch ran from Philip II through Philip III and Philip IV to Charles II, whose death in 1700 without an heir set off the War of the Spanish Succession. The Austrian branch ran from Ferdinand I through Ferdinand II and Ferdinand III to Charles VI, whose daughter Maria Theresa became the only woman to rule the Habsburg lands in her own right. Her marriage to Francis I Stephen of Lorraine founded the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, which produced Joseph II, Leopold II, Marie Antoinette, Francis II, and the long-reigning Franz Joseph I. ## Significance For six centuries the Habsburgs shaped the map of Europe less by conquest than by marriage, holding together a multilingual realm of Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Italians, Croats and others under a single crown. They led the Counter-Reformation, halted Ottoman expansion at Vienna in 1683, and gave Europe both the Thirty Years' War and the Congress system that followed Napoleon. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 triggered the First World War, and the abdication of Charles I in 1918 ended Habsburg rule. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Founder of the royal line | Rudolf I of Habsburg, King of the Romans from 1273 | | Family seat | Habsburg Castle, Aargau; later Vienna, Graz and Madrid | | Height of power | Charles V (1500 to 1558), ruler of Spain, the Netherlands, Austria, Naples and Spanish America | | Spanish line | Philip II to Charles II, 1556 to 1700 | | Austrian line | Ferdinand I to Charles VI, 1521 to 1740 | | Habsburg-Lorraine | From Maria Theresa and Francis I Stephen, 1736 onward | | Last reigning monarch | Charles I of Austria, who left government in 1918 | | Principal titles | Holy Roman Emperor, Emperor of Austria, King of Spain, Hungary and Bohemia |
The Rockefeller family is an American business and philanthropic dynasty founded on the Standard Oil fortune of John D. Rockefeller, whose descendants have shaped American banking, conservation, medicine, modern art and national politics across five generations. From a modest upstate New York farmhouse the family rose to control the largest industrial enterprise of the Gilded Age, then spent the twentieth century converting that fortune into foundations, museums, parks and public office. ## Origins The line begins with William Avery Rockefeller (1810-1906), a traveling salesman from Granger, New York, and his wife Eliza Davison (1813-1889), who married in 1837 and raised six children in Richford, Moravia and Owego before the family moved to Ohio. Their eldest son, John D. Rockefeller, began as a Cleveland bookkeeper, entered oil refining in 1863 and incorporated the Standard Oil Company in 1870 together with his younger brother William Rockefeller. By the 1880s Standard Oil refined the great majority of American petroleum, until the Supreme Court ordered its dissolution in 1911. ## Notable members John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Rockefeller had four children who reached adulthood, among them the Chicago arts patron Edith Rockefeller McCormick and the family's only son, John D. Rockefeller Jr. With Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, a co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art, John Jr. had six children who defined the family's public face: Abby "Babs" Rockefeller Mauze, the philanthropist John D. Rockefeller III, Nelson Rockefeller, who served four terms as Governor of New York and then as Vice President of the United States, the conservationist and venture capitalist Laurance Rockefeller, Winthrop Rockefeller, Governor of Arkansas, and the banker David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan. Their children, known within the family as the Cousins, include Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the Asmat art collector Michael Rockefeller, Lieutenant Governor Winthrop Paul Rockefeller of Arkansas, the economist Neva Goodwin and the Synergos founder Peggy Dulany. ## Significance The family's lasting mark is institutional rather than dynastic. The Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Chicago, Rockefeller University, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Center, the Museum of Modern Art, Colonial Williamsburg, Lincoln Center, the Asia Society and several national parks all trace their founding or their endowment to a Rockefeller. Few American families have moved so completely from industrial fortune to organized philanthropy and elected office within three generations. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Surname | Rockefeller | | Origin | Richford, New York, United States | | Founder | John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) | | Family business | Standard Oil, later Chase Manhattan Bank | | Known for | Standard Oil, the Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller Center, the Museum of Modern Art | | Public offices held | Vice President of the United States, Governor of New York, Governor of Arkansas, United States Senator | | Generations covered | Five, from William Avery Rockefeller to the fourth-generation Cousins |
## Lord Krishna and His Close Family: A Complete Family Biography Lord Krishna is one of the most revered deities in Hinduism and the eighth incarnation (avatar) of Lord Vishnu. His life, described in the **Mahabharata**, **Bhagavata Purana**, **Harivamsa**, and other sacred texts, is filled with stories of divine love, wisdom, courage, and dharma. Beyond his role as a spiritual guide and warrior, Krishna belonged to the illustrious **Yadava dynasty**, and his family played a central role in many events of Indian mythology. ### Parents: Vasudeva and Devaki Krishna was born in **Mathura** to **Vasudeva** and **Devaki**, members of the royal Yadava family. Devaki was the sister of King Kamsa, whose prophecy foretold that her eighth son would end his reign. To protect the newborn Krishna, Vasudeva carried him across the Yamuna River on the night of his birth and entrusted him to foster parents in Gokul. Devaki and Vasudeva remained symbols of sacrifice and unwavering faith throughout Krishna's life. ### Foster Parents: Nanda and Yashoda Krishna was lovingly raised by **Nanda Maharaja** and **Yashoda** in the village of **Gokul** and later **Vrindavan**. Nanda was the respected chief of the cowherd community, while Yashoda became one of Hinduism's most celebrated maternal figures. Her affectionate relationship with Krishna, including stories of butter theft and childhood miracles, represents unconditional love and devotion. ### Brother and Sister Krishna's elder brother, **Balarama**, is considered an incarnation of **Shesha**, the divine serpent associated with Lord Vishnu. Balarama was Krishna's closest companion, protector, and guide throughout his youth and adulthood. Krishna's younger sister **Subhadra** became an important figure in the Mahabharata after marrying **Arjuna**, making Krishna both Arjuna's cousin and brother-in-law. Subhadra was also the mother of the heroic warrior **Abhimanyu**. ### Wives of Lord Krishna Krishna is traditionally said to have **eight principal queens**, known as the **Ashtabharya**. The most prominent among them was **Rukmini**, regarded as the goddess Lakshmi's incarnation and Krishna's chief queen in Dwarka. Other principal queens include **Satyabhama**, known for her courage and determination; **Jambavati**, daughter of the bear king Jambavan; **Kalindi**, **Mitravinda**, **Nagnajiti (Satya)**, **Bhadra**, and **Lakshmana**. According to the Bhagavata Purana, Krishna also married **16,100 women** whom he rescued from captivity, restoring their dignity and status. ### Sons and Daughters Ancient texts describe Krishna as having many children through his queens. His most famous son was **Pradyumna**, born to Rukmini and considered an incarnation of Kamadeva, the god of love. Pradyumna became a renowned Yadava prince and warrior. Another well-known son was **Samba**, born to Jambavati. Although brave, Samba's mischievous actions eventually contributed to the downfall of the Yadava dynasty through a famous curse narrative. Other sons included **Charudeshna**, **Aniruddha's father Pradyumna**, **Bhanu**, **Gada**, and several others born to Krishna's different queens. The Puranas also mention daughters, though they receive less detailed attention than his sons. ### Grandchildren and Legacy Krishna's grandson **Aniruddha**, son of Pradyumna and Rukmavati, became one of the most important heirs of the Yadava dynasty. His marriage to **Usha**, daughter of the powerful king Bana, is celebrated in Hindu mythology. Aniruddha's son **Vajra** survived the destruction of the Yadavas after the Mausala Parva. Following Krishna's departure from the earthly world, Vajra became the ruler of **Indraprastha** and later regions associated with Mathura, preserving Krishna's royal lineage. ### The Yadava Family Legacy Krishna's family represents devotion, duty, sacrifice, and divine purpose. From Devaki's courage and Yashoda's unconditional love to Balarama's loyalty, Rukmini's devotion, Subhadra's connection to the Pandavas, and Vajra's continuation of the dynasty, each family member contributed to the enduring legacy of the Yadava lineage. Together, they form one of the most influential and beloved family trees in Hindu mythology, connecting the stories of the Mahabharata, Bhagavata Purana, and the spiritual traditions followed by millions around the world.
Frederick William IV of Prussia's recorded parents are Frederick William III of Prussia, Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
Frederick William IV of Prussia married Elisabeth Ludovika of Bavaria.
Frederick William IV of Prussia has 3 recorded siblings: Wilhelm I of Prussia, Charlotte of Prussia, Charles of Prussia.
Frederick William IV of Prussia is recorded as King of Prussia in the Hohenzollern family tree.
Frederick William IV of Prussia's recorded native place is Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia.
12 ancestors and 0 descendants of Frederick William IV of Prussia are recorded so far, within a tree of 53 people.
Frederick William IV of Prussia is recorded as Frederick II of Prussia's 5 steps away.
Frederick William IV of Prussia is recorded in the Hohenzollern family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 52 other people.
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