Public Family Trees/Orange-Nassau/Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands
Born 1967 · Male · Utrecht, Netherlands
Son of Beatrix of the Netherlands and Claus of the Netherlands
7
Generation
12
Ancestors
3
Descendants
3
Children
1
Marriages
Willem-Alexander (born 1967) has been King of the Netherlands since 30 April 2013, when his mother Beatrix abdicated in his favour, making him the first Dutch king in more than a century. The eldest son of Beatrix and Prince Claus, he was born in Utrecht, read history at Leiden University and trained with the Royal Netherlands Navy and Air Force, keeping up his flying ever since. Before his accession he chaired the U…
Born1967
Born to Beatrix of the Netherlands, Claus of the Netherlands.
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A partnership that connects two branches of the Orange-Nassau family.
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3 children recorded in this branch.
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Gen 1 · 1772 - 1843
William I (1772 to 1843) was the first King of the Netherlands and the founder of the Dutch monarchy. Born in The Hague as the son of William V, the last stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, he fought against the French invasion of 1795 and then spent nearly two decades in exile in Britain and Prussia. He returned in 1813 as sovereign prince and was proclaimed king in 1815, ruling Luxembourg as grand duke at the same time. Nicknamed the Merchant King for the canals, shipping lines and industry he financed, he lost the southern provinces in the Belgian Revolution of 1830 and abdicated in 1840 in favour of his son William II. With his wife and first cousin Wilhelmina of Prussia he was the ancestor of every Dutch monarch since.
Gen 2 · 1792 - 1849
William II (1792 to 1849) was King of the Netherlands and Grand Duke of Luxembourg from 1840 until his death. Born in The Hague and educated in Berlin and at Oxford, he made his name as a soldier, serving under Wellington in Spain and commanding Dutch and Belgian troops at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, where he was wounded. As Prince of Orange he tried and failed to hold the southern provinces during the Belgian Revolution of 1830. Succeeding his father William I in 1840, he is remembered above all for accepting in 1848 the liberal constitution drafted by Johan Rudolph Thorbecke, which moved real power to parliament and shaped the modern Dutch monarchy. He married Anna Pavlovna of Russia, a sister of two tsars.
Gen 2 · 1797 - 1881
Prince Frederick of the Netherlands (1797 to 1881) was the second son of King William I and Wilhelmina of Prussia and a career soldier in both Dutch and Prussian service. Born in Berlin during his family's exile, he rose to field marshal, commanded the Dutch forces in the Ten Days' Campaign against Belgium in 1831 and was for decades the senior military figure of the young kingdom. He served as Grand Master of Dutch freemasonry for more than sixty years and was a well known patron of charities, schools and the arts. In 1825 he married Princess Louise of Prussia. A younger brother of King William II, he died at Wassenaar in 1881.
Gen 2 · 1810 - 1883
Princess Marianne of the Netherlands (1810 to 1883) was the youngest daughter of King William I and Wilhelmina of Prussia and a sister of King William II. Born in Berlin while her family was in exile, she married Prince Albert of Prussia in 1830; the marriage ended in separation and divorce, which cost her her standing at the Prussian court and kept her away from Berlin for the rest of her life. She bought the Reinhartshausen estate in the Rhine valley and built a great palace at Kamenz in Prussian Silesia, becoming known as a collector of paintings and as a builder of churches, schools and roads for the districts she owned. She died in the Rhineland in 1883.
Gen 3 · 1817 - 1890
William III (1817 to 1890) was King of the Netherlands and Grand Duke of Luxembourg from 1849 until his death. Born in Brussels to King William II and Anna Pavlovna of Russia, he resented the constitutional limits his father had accepted in 1848 and clashed repeatedly with his ministers across a long reign in which slavery was abolished in the Dutch colonies, the railways spread and the country industrialised. His attempt to sell Luxembourg to France touched off the international crisis of 1867. After his first wife Sophie of Wurttemberg and all three of their sons had died, he married Emma of Waldeck and Pyrmont in 1879, and their only child Wilhelmina succeeded him in 1890.
Gen 3 · 1824 - 1897
Princess Sophie of the Netherlands (1824 to 1897) was the only surviving daughter of King William II and Anna Pavlovna of Russia and a sister of King William III. Born in The Hague, she married Carl Alexander, the future Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, in 1842 and spent the rest of her life in Germany as his consort. She was a serious patron of music and scholarship in a Weimar still living on its literary reputation, and when Goethe's last grandson left the poet's papers to her she founded the Goethe Archive there in 1885, the institution that grew into the Goethe and Schiller Archive. She died in Weimar in 1897.
Gen 4 · 1880 - 1962
Wilhelmina (1880 to 1962) was Queen of the Netherlands from 1890 to 1948 and the longest reigning Dutch monarch. The only child of King William III and Emma of Waldeck and Pyrmont, she came to the throne at the age of ten under her mother's regency and was inaugurated in her own right in 1898. She held the Netherlands to neutrality through the First World War and made the monarchy a byword for stubborn independence. When Germany invaded in May 1940 she escaped to London, where she led the government in exile and spoke to the occupied country over Radio Oranje, becoming the voice of Dutch resistance. She returned in 1945, abdicated in favour of her daughter Juliana in 1948 and died at Het Loo in 1962.
Gen 6 · b. 1939
Princess Irene of the Netherlands (born 1939) is the second daughter of Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard and a younger sister of Princess Beatrix. Born at Soestdijk Palace, she set off a constitutional storm in 1964 when her conversion to Roman Catholicism and her marriage to Carlos Hugo, Duke of Parma, the Carlist claimant to the Spanish throne, went ahead without the approval of parliament, costing her her place in the line of succession. She spent years at her husband's side in Spanish politics before the marriage ended in 1981. Since then she has worked as a writer and campaigner on nature and the human relationship with it, founding the NatuurCollege foundation in 1995.
Gen 6 · b. 1943
Princess Margriet of the Netherlands (born 1943) is the third daughter of Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard. She was born in Ottawa during her family's wartime exile, in a hospital room declared Dutch territory for the occasion so that she would hold her mother's nationality alone, and the tulips Canada receives from the Netherlands every year date from that stay. She married the jurist Pieter van Vollenhoven in 1967 and they have four sons. For decades one of the busiest working members of the royal family, she has been closely identified with the Netherlands Red Cross and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and with equestrian and veterans' causes.
Gen 1 · 1774 - 1837
Wilhelmina of Prussia (1774 to 1837) was the first Queen of the Netherlands, as the wife of King William I. A daughter of King Frederick William II of Prussia, she was born in Potsdam and married her first cousin, the future Dutch king, in Berlin in 1791. The couple spent nearly twenty years in exile after the French overran the Dutch Republic, returning in 1813, and she became queen when her husband took the royal title in 1815. Reserved by temperament and energetic in charitable work, she was the mother of King William II, Prince Frederick and Princess Marianne. She died in The Hague in 1837, three years before her husband's abdication.
Gen 3 · 1818 - 1848
Prince Alexander of the Netherlands (1818 to 1848) was the second son of King William II and Anna Pavlovna of Russia and a younger brother of King William III. He was born in Brussels, at a time when his grandfather's kingdom still included the southern provinces that later became Belgium. Educated for a military career, he served as an officer in the Dutch army and navy and took a particular interest in the technical side of the fleet. He never married. He died on the Portuguese island of Madeira in 1848 at the age of twenty-nine and was buried with his family in the royal vault of the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft.
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 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 |
Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands's recorded parents are Beatrix of the Netherlands, Claus of the Netherlands.
Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands has 3 recorded children: Catharina-Amalia of the Netherlands, Alexia of the Netherlands, Ariane of the Netherlands.
Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands married Maxima of the Netherlands.
Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands has 2 recorded siblings: Friso of Orange-Nassau, Constantijn of the Netherlands.
Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands is recorded as King of the Netherlands in the Orange-Nassau family tree.
Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands's recorded native place is Utrecht, Netherlands.
12 ancestors and 3 descendants of Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands are recorded so far, within a tree of 33 people.
Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands is recorded as William I of the Netherlands's 6 steps away.
Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands is recorded in the Orange-Nassau family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 32 other people.
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