Public Family Trees/Orange-Nassau/William of Orange-Nassau
1840 - 1879 ยท Male ยท The Hague, Netherlands
Son of William III of the Netherlands and Sophie of Wurttemberg
4
Generation
6
Ancestors
0
Descendants
0
Children
0
Marriages
William of Orange-Nassau
1840 - 1879
William, Prince of Orange (1840 to 1879) was the eldest son of King William III and Sophie of Wurttemberg and, for almost all of his life, heir to the Dutch throne. Born in The Hague, he was far closer to his mother than to his father and quarrelled bitterly with the king, who refused to let him marry the Dutch noblewoman he had chosen. He spent his last years largely in Paris, where his open-handed and extravagant lโฆ
Born1840
Born to William III of the Netherlands, Sophie of Wurttemberg.
Legacy
A defining role in the story of the Orange-Nassau family.
Died1879
The close of a life whose connections continue through the family record.
Your turn
Free, with no sign-up to start. Add yourself, then your parents and grandparents, and watch the tree grow.
Gen 1 ยท 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 ยท 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 ยท 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 ยท 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 5 ยท 1909 - 2004
Juliana (1909 to 2004) was Queen of the Netherlands from 1948 to 1980. The only child of Queen Wilhelmina and Prince Henry, she studied at Leiden University and married Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld in 1937. She spent the Second World War with her young daughters in Canada, where her third daughter Margriet was born, and came home to a country that had grown used to thinking of her as one of its own. Her reign took in Indonesian independence, the North Sea flood of 1953, when her visits to the drowned villages were long remembered, and the social upheavals of the 1960s. Informal and warm in manner, she was known as the citizen queen. She abdicated in favour of her daughter Beatrix in 1980 and died at Soestdijk Palace in 2004.
Gen 6 ยท b. 1938
Beatrix (born 1938) was Queen of the Netherlands from 1980 until her abdication in 2013. The eldest daughter of Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard, she was born at Soestdijk Palace, spent the war years as a child with her family in Canada and read law at Leiden University. Her marriage in 1966 to the German diplomat Claus von Amsberg drew angry protests in Amsterdam, yet the couple became genuinely loved, and she was the mother of King Willem-Alexander, Prince Friso and Prince Constantijn. As queen she was known for an exacting command of her state papers and a formal, hard working style that steadied the monarchy for three decades. She handed the throne to her eldest son on 30 April 2013 and still carries out public duties as Princess Beatrix.
Gen 6 ยท 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 ยท 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 7 ยท b. 1967
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 United Nations Secretary-General's advisory board on water and sanitation, a subject he still works on. He married the Argentine born Maxima Zorreguieta in Amsterdam in 2002; their eldest daughter, Catharina-Amalia, Princess of Orange, is heir to the throne.
Gen 7 ยท 1968 - 2013
Prince Friso of Orange-Nassau (1968 to 2013) was the second son of Queen Beatrix and Prince Claus and a younger brother of King Willem-Alexander. Born in Utrecht, he trained as an aerospace engineer and also studied economics, then built a career in business and finance largely out of the public eye, keeping an interest in engineering and energy throughout his working life. When he married Mabel Wisse Smit in 2004 the government declined to ask parliament to consent to the marriage, so he gave up his place in the line of succession and took the title Prince Friso of Orange-Nassau. The couple had two daughters. He died in The Hague in 2013 at the age of forty-four.
Gen 7 ยท b. 1969
Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands (born 1969) is the youngest son of Queen Beatrix and Prince Claus and stands fourth in line to the Dutch throne, after his brother the king's three daughters. Born in Utrecht, he read law at Leiden University, took a business degree at INSEAD and worked for the European Commission, the research institute RAND Europe and in management consultancy. Since 2016 he has been special envoy for the Dutch start-up sector, first with StartupDelta and then with Techleap, and he speaks and writes regularly on digital innovation and entrepreneurship. He married Laurentien Brinkhorst in 2001 and they have three children.
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 |
The Kennedy family is an Irish American political dynasty from Boston, Massachusetts, whose members have included the 35th President of the United States, three United States senators, four congressmen, several ambassadors, and the founders of the Peace Corps and the Special Olympics. Across four documented generations the family moved from a County Wexford farm to the White House, and its name became shorthand in American public life for both political ambition and public service. ## Origins The American line begins with Patrick Kennedy, a farmer's son from Dunganstown, near New Ross in County Wexford, who emigrated to East Boston during the Great Famine. His son, Patrick Joseph "P. J." Kennedy (1858 to 1929), built a livelihood in the liquor and banking trades and served in both houses of the Massachusetts legislature, becoming one of the Democratic ward leaders who ran the city's Irish Catholic politics. On the other side stood John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald (1863 to 1950), congressman and twice Mayor of Boston. The two families joined in 1914 when P. J.'s son Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. married Honey Fitz's daughter Rose Fitzgerald. Their nine children, raised between Brookline, Bronxville and the compound at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, form the generation the world knows. ## Notable members John F. Kennedy served as President from 1961 until his death in 1963, having previously represented Massachusetts in the House and Senate. His brother Robert F. Kennedy was Attorney General, then Senator from New York, and a candidate for the presidency in 1968. Their youngest brother Edward "Ted" Kennedy sat in the United States Senate for almost 47 years and was one of the most productive legislators of his era. The eldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., was a naval aviator killed on a volunteer mission in 1944. Away from elected office, Eunice Kennedy Shriver founded the Special Olympics, her husband Sargent Shriver created the Peace Corps and Head Start, and Jean Kennedy Smith founded the arts and disability organisation VSA before serving as United States Ambassador to Ireland. The following generations have produced congressmen, a lieutenant governor, ambassadors, documentary filmmakers, human rights advocates and journalists. ## Significance No other American family has combined electoral success, philanthropy and public visibility on this scale for so long. The Kennedys shaped the civil rights era, the space programme, immigration reform, health care legislation and the modern understanding of disability rights, and their private losses were mourned publicly in a way usually reserved for royalty. The Kennedy Library in Boston, the Kennedy Center in Washington and dozens of schools and institutions carry the name. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Family name | Kennedy | | Irish origin | Dunganstown, County Wexford, Ireland | | American home | Boston and Hyannis Port, Massachusetts | | Founding couple | Patrick Joseph Kennedy and Mary Augusta Hickey | | Best known member | John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States | | Generations covered | Four | | Offices held | Presidency, US Senate, US House, ambassadorships, state office | | Institutions founded | Peace Corps, Special Olympics, Best Buddies, Citizens Energy |
The House of Bonaparte is the French imperial dynasty founded by Napoleon I, a family of minor Corsican nobles from Ajaccio who within one generation ruled France and placed brothers and sisters on the thrones of Spain, Holland, Naples and Westphalia, and whose senior line survives today in Jean-Christophe, Prince Napoleon. The family descends from Carlo Buonaparte, an Ajaccio lawyer, and Letizia Ramolino, whose eight surviving children were born between 1768 and 1784 on an island that had only just passed from Genoese to French rule. The second son, Napoleon, became First Consul in 1799 and Emperor of the French in 1804, and the whole family rose with him. ## Origins in Corsica The Buonaparte were a patrician family of Ajaccio with roots traced to Tuscany, holding local office and a modest estate rather than great wealth. Carlo Buonaparte studied law at Pisa, served in the Corsican assembly and secured French recognition of the family's noble status, which opened the military academies of Brienne and Paris to his sons. After his death in 1785 Letizia Ramolino held the household together, later presiding over the imperial court as Madame Mere and outliving the Empire itself. ## Notable members Napoleon I is the figure the family is remembered for: general of the Italian and Egyptian campaigns, author of the Civil Code, and Emperor until his abdication in 1815 and exile on Saint Helena. His siblings became sovereigns in their own right, Joseph in Naples and Spain, Louis in Holland, Elisa in Tuscany, Caroline in Naples with her husband Joachim Murat, and Jerome in Westphalia. Napoleon's only legitimate son, Napoleon II, was titled King of Rome. The dynasty returned to power through Louis and Hortense de Beauharnais's son, who ruled as Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870 alongside Empress Eugenie. Later generations produced the ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte and the celebrated Paris salon hostess Princess Mathilde. ## Significance No other modern European family moved so far so quickly, and few left as deep a mark. The Napoleonic Code still underpins the civil law of much of continental Europe and Latin America, while the Second Empire rebuilt Paris into the city of boulevards visitors see today. Two empires, two exiles and a princely line that continues in the present make the Bonapartes the most consequential of the newer European houses. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Family name | Bonaparte, originally Buonaparte | | Place of origin | Ajaccio, Corsica, with earlier roots in Tuscany | | Founding couple | Carlo Buonaparte and Letizia Ramolino | | Best known member | Napoleon I, Emperor of the French | | Thrones held | France, Italy, Spain, Holland, Naples, Westphalia | | Imperial periods | First Empire 1804 to 1815, Second Empire 1852 to 1870 | | Current head of the house | Jean-Christophe, Prince Napoleon, born 1986 | | Generations in this tree | Five, from Carlo Buonaparte to Jean-Christophe |
The House of Hohenzollern is the German dynasty that ruled Brandenburg from 1415, held the Prussian crown from 1701, and gave Germany its three emperors between 1871 and the fall of the monarchy in 1918. This tree follows the senior Prussian line in one unbroken descent, from Frederick William the Great Elector, through the kings of Prussia and the German Emperors, down to Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia, the present head of the house. ## Origins The family takes its name from Hohenzollern Castle on a hill in the Swabian Alb, where a line of counts is recorded from the eleventh century. A Swabian Zollern married into the burgraviate of Nuremberg in 1192, and the Franconian branch that grew from it spent two centuries accumulating lands and credit with the Holy Roman Emperors. The decisive moment came in 1415, when Emperor Sigismund invested Frederick VI of Nuremberg as Elector of Brandenburg in return for his political and financial support. The Duchy of Prussia, a separate inheritance lying outside the Empire, passed to the Brandenburg electors in 1618, and Frederick William, the Great Elector, welded the two into a single functioning state after the devastation of the Thirty Years' War. ## Notable members Frederick I turned the electorate into a kingdom in 1701. His son Frederick William I, the Soldier King, built the army and the treasury that his own son, **Frederick the Great**, used to seize Silesia and to make Prussia a European power, while also composing music, building Sanssouci and corresponding with Voltaire. **Queen Louise** became the emotional centre of Prussian resistance to Napoleon. **Wilhelm I**, with Otto von Bismarck as his minister president, was proclaimed German Emperor at Versailles in 1871. His son **Frederick III** and the liberal English princess he married, Victoria, daughter of Queen Victoria, reigned for only ninety nine days. **Wilhelm II**, the last Kaiser, abdicated in 1918 and died in Dutch exile in 1941. ## Significance No other German family shaped the modern state so directly. Hohenzollern rulers created the Prussian civil service, compulsory schooling and the general staff, sponsored the Berlin academies and the Humboldt university model, and then used Prussian power to unify Germany around themselves. The monarchy ended with the revolution of November 1918, but the house continues as a private family: the headship passed from Wilhelm II to his eldest son, then to Louis Ferdinand, and in 1994 to Georg Friedrich, whose own father and uncles are part of the succession story told in this tree. ## Quick facts | Fact | Details | |---|---| | Family name | Hohenzollern | | Place of origin | Hohenzollern Castle, Swabia, southern Germany | | Ruled | Brandenburg from 1415, Prussia from 1618, Germany from 1871 | | Royal title | King in Prussia from 1701, King of Prussia from 1772 | | Imperial title | German Emperor, 1871 to 1918 | | German Emperors | Wilhelm I, Frederick III, Wilhelm II | | Monarchy ended | 9 November 1918 | | Present head of the house | Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia, since 1994 | | Principal residences | Berlin City Palace, Sanssouci and Cecilienhof at Potsdam, Charlottenburg | | Branch shown here | The senior Prussian line only, not Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen |
William of Orange-Nassau's recorded parents are William III of the Netherlands, Sophie of Wurttemberg.
William of Orange-Nassau has 2 recorded siblings: Alexander of Orange-Nassau, Wilhelmina of the Netherlands.
William of Orange-Nassau is recorded as Prince of Orange, heir to the Dutch throne in the Orange-Nassau family tree.
William of Orange-Nassau's recorded native place is The Hague, Netherlands.
6 ancestors and 0 descendants of William of Orange-Nassau are recorded so far, within a tree of 33 people.
William of Orange-Nassau is recorded as William I of the Netherlands's Great-Grandson.
William of Orange-Nassau is recorded in the Orange-Nassau family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 32 other people.
Trace William of Orange-Nassau's connections across the Orange-Nassautree, or begin preserving your own family's history today.
Free. Private by default. GEDCOM export any time.