Gheorghe Comăneci

Stuart Family Tree - The House of Stuart from Mary, Queen of Scots to Bonnie Prince Charlie

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 Jackson Family Tree - Michael Jackson

Bourbon Family Tree - The House of Bourbon in France and Spain

The House of Bourbon is a European royal dynasty, descended in the male line from the Capetian kings of France, that ruled France from 1589 to 1792 and again from 1814 to 1848, and that still reigns in Spain today under King Felipe VI. Over four centuries its members also held the thrones of Navarre, Naples and Sicily, Parma and Etruria, which makes it one of the most widely established royal houses in European history. ## Origins The family takes its name from the lordship of Bourbon in the Auvergne, centred on Bourbon-l'Archambault. Its royal line descends from Robert, Count of Clermont, a younger son of King Louis IX of France, whose marriage to Beatrice of Burgundy, heiress of Bourbon, carried the name into the Capetian house in 1272. For three centuries afterwards the Bourbons were powerful French princes of the blood rather than kings. That changed with Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Vendome, whose marriage to Jeanne d'Albret, queen regnant of Navarre, produced Henry of Navarre. When the Valois line died out in 1589, Henry was the senior Capetian heir, and he took the French throne as Henry IV. ## Notable members Henry IV ended the French Wars of Religion and issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598. His son Louis XIII, guided by Cardinal Richelieu, built the centralised state that Louis XIV, the Sun King, carried to its height across a reign of seventy-two years, the longest of any European sovereign, and to the palace of Versailles. Louis XV and then Louis XVI inherited that system, and Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were swept away by the French Revolution in 1792. The dynasty returned with Louis XVIII in 1814 and Charles X in 1824, and in 1830 the crown passed to Louis Philippe I of the cadet House of Orleans, the last king to rule in France. ## The Spanish branch In 1700 the childless Charles II of Spain left his crown to Philip, Duke of Anjou, a grandson of Louis XIV. Philip became Philip V, the first Bourbon king of Spain, at the cost of the War of the Spanish Succession, which ended with his renunciation of any claim to the French throne. His descendants include the reforming Charles III, Ferdinand VII, Isabella II, Alfonso XII and Alfonso XIII, who left Spain in 1931. The monarchy was restored in 1975 under Juan Carlos I, grandson of Alfonso XIII, who presided over Spain's transition to democracy and abdicated in 2014 in favour of his son Felipe VI. Felipe's elder daughter Leonor, Princess of Asturias, is heir to the throne. ## Significance No other family links the absolute monarchy of Versailles to a working constitutional monarchy in twenty-first century Madrid. Bourbon marriages tied the house to the Habsburgs of Austria and Spain, the dukes of Savoy, the Medici of Florence and the British royal family, so a Bourbon family tree doubles as a map of European dynastic politics from the Reformation to the present day. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Family name | House of Bourbon (Maison de Bourbon, Casa de Borbon) | | Place of origin | Bourbon-l'Archambault, Auvergne, France | | Founder of the line | Robert, Count of Clermont (1256-1317), son of Louis IX | | First king of France | Henry IV, reigned 1589 to 1610 | | Last king to rule France | Louis Philippe I, reigned 1830 to 1848 | | First king of Spain | Philip V, reigned 1700 to 1746 | | Head of the house in Spain | King Felipe VI, since 2014 | | Heir in Spain | Leonor, Princess of Asturias | | Principal seats | Versailles, Fontainebleau, the Louvre, the Royal Palace of Madrid |

Vanderbilt Family Tree - America's Gilded Age Dynasty

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 |