Public Family Trees/Plantagenet/Blanche of Lancaster
1342 - 1368 Β· Female Β· Bolingbroke, England
7
Generation
0
Ancestors
4
Descendants
1
Children
1
Marriages
Blanche of Lancaster
1342 - 1368
Blanche of Lancaster was the heiress of the greatest private inheritance in England and the first wife of John of Gaunt. Born in 1342, she was the younger daughter of Henry of Grosmont, 1st Duke of Lancaster, and after her sister's death she carried the whole Lancastrian estate, which passed to her husband on their marriage in 1359. Their surviving children were Philippa, who became Queen of Portugal, Elizabeth, andβ¦
Born1342
The beginning of Blanche of Lancaster's recorded life.
Family
A partnership that connects two branches of the Plantagenet family.
Legacy
A defining role in the story of the Plantagenet family.
Died1368
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 Β· 1133 - 1189
Henry II was King of England from 1154 to 1189 and the first monarch of the House of Plantagenet. Born at Le Mans in 1133 to Geoffrey V of Anjou and Empress Matilda, he inherited Anjou and Normandy, gained Aquitaine through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, and took the English crown two years later, ruling lands that stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. He rebuilt royal government after the civil war called the Anarchy, and his legal reforms, among them itinerant justices and sworn juries, laid the foundations of English common law. His reign was marked by his quarrel with Archbishop Thomas Becket and by rebellions led by his own sons. He died at Chinon in 1189 and was succeeded by Richard I.
Gen 2 Β· 1157 - 1199
Richard I, known as Richard the Lionheart, was King of England from 1189 to 1199 and one of the leading commanders of the Third Crusade. Born at Oxford in 1157, a son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, he was brought up in his mother's duchy of Aquitaine and became its duke, rebelling against his father more than once before succeeding him. He spent almost his entire reign abroad, campaigning in the Holy Land against Saladin, where he took Acre and Jaffa but never recovered Jerusalem. Returning overland, he was held for a vast ransom in Germany while England was governed by his officials and his mother. He died in the Limousin in 1199 and was succeeded by his brother John.
Gen 2 Β· 1166 - 1216
John was King of England from 1199 to 1216, the youngest son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Born at Oxford in 1166, he succeeded his brother Richard I and by 1204 had lost Normandy, Anjou and most of the family's continental lands to Philip II of France. Heavy taxation to fund attempts at their recovery, together with quarrels with the church and with his barons, provoked a rebellion that forced him to accept Magna Carta at Runnymede in June 1215, the charter that first set down in writing that the king was subject to law. War resumed almost at once, and he died at Newark in October 1216, leaving the throne to his nine-year-old son Henry III.
Gen 3 Β· 1207 - 1272
Henry III was King of England from 1216 to 1272, one of the longest reigns in English history. The son of King John and Isabella of AngoulΓͺme, he was born at Winchester in 1207 and crowned at the age of nine while much of the country was still in rebel hands, ruling through regents until 1234. A devout and artistically minded king, he rebuilt Westminster Abbey in the Gothic style as a shrine for Edward the Confessor and as the burial church of his dynasty. His reliance on foreign relatives and his costly foreign schemes provoked the baronial reform movement of 1258 and the Second Barons' War, in which Simon de Montfort briefly controlled the government before being defeated by the king's son, the future Edward I.
Gen 4 Β· 1239 - 1307
Edward I, called Longshanks, was King of England from 1272 to 1307. Born at Westminster in 1239, the eldest son of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence, he defeated Simon de Montfort at Evesham in 1265 and was away on crusade when he succeeded his father. As king he issued a great series of statutes that reshaped English land law and justice, summoned the Model Parliament of 1295, and completed the conquest of Wales, ringing it with castles such as Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech. His later years were consumed by war in Scotland against William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. He married Eleanor of Castile, whose death in 1290 he marked with the Eleanor crosses, and died at Burgh by Sands in 1307.
Gen 5 Β· 1284 - 1327
Edward II was King of England from 1307 to 1327. Born at Caernarfon in 1284, the son of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, he was the first English heir to hold the title Prince of Wales. His reign was dominated by conflict with his barons over his reliance on favourites, above all Piers Gaveston and later Hugh Despenser the Younger, and by military failure in Scotland, where Robert the Bruce destroyed an English army at Bannockburn in 1314. In 1326 his wife Isabella of France and the exiled baron Roger Mortimer invaded England, and in January 1327 Edward became the first English king to be deposed by parliament, in favour of his teenage son Edward III. He died later that year at Berkeley Castle.
Gen 6 Β· 1312 - 1377
Edward III was King of England from 1327 to 1377, one of the longest and most celebrated reigns of the Middle Ages. Born at Windsor in 1312 to Edward II and Isabella of France, he came to the throne as a boy after his father's deposition and took power into his own hands in 1330. Claiming the French crown through his mother, he opened the Hundred Years' War, winning at Sluys in 1340 and CrΓ©cy in 1346 and taking Calais, while his eldest son, the Black Prince, triumphed at Poitiers. He founded the Order of the Garter in 1348 and presided over the arrival of the Black Death and the steady growth of parliament. His many sons, and the rivalry of their descendants, shaped English politics for a century.
Gen 7 Β· 1330 - 1376
Edward of Woodstock, known to later ages as the Black Prince, was the eldest son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault and the most admired English soldier of his age. Born in 1330, he was created Prince of Wales in 1343 and commanded a division at CrΓ©cy in 1346 at the age of sixteen. Ten years later at Poitiers he captured John II of France, and from 1362 he ruled the principality of Aquitaine for his father. His later campaign in Castile drained his resources and his health, and he returned to England in 1371. He married his cousin Joan of Kent and died in 1376, a year before his father, so the crown passed instead to his young son Richard II.
Gen 7 Β· 1338 - 1368
Lionel of Antwerp, 1st Duke of Clarence, was the second surviving son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault, born at Antwerp in 1338 while his parents were in the Low Countries. Through his marriage as a boy to Elizabeth de Burgh he became Earl of Ulster and one of the greatest landholders in Ireland, and in 1361 Edward III sent him there as lieutenant; the parliament he held at Kilkenny in 1366 produced the Statutes of Kilkenny. Created Duke of Clarence in 1362, he travelled to Italy in 1368 for a second marriage and died at Alba a few months later. His only child, Philippa, carried his line to the Mortimer earls of March and, through them, to the house of York.
Gen 8 Β· 1367 - 1400
Richard II was King of England from 1377 to 1399, the son of Edward the Black Prince and Joan of Kent. Born at Bordeaux in 1367, he succeeded his grandfather Edward III at the age of ten and faced the Peasants' Revolt at fourteen, riding out to meet the rebels at Smithfield. His adult rule was marked by struggles with the Lords Appellant, who curbed his power in 1388, and by a later reassertion of royal authority that his opponents called tyranny. A notable patron of art and architecture, he rebuilt the roof of Westminster Hall. In 1399 he was deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, who took the throne as Henry IV, and he died at Pontefract Castle early in 1400.
Gen 9 Β· 1404 - 1444
John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset, was an English commander in the closing stages of the Hundred Years' War and the father of Margaret Beaufort. Born in 1404, the son of John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset, and a grandson of John of Gaunt, he was captured at the battle of Bauge in 1421 and spent some seventeen years as a prisoner in France. Ransomed at last, he was created Duke of Somerset in 1443 and given command of an expensive expedition to France that achieved little and cost him the king's favour. He died in 1444, leaving an only daughter, Margaret, then a year old, whose Beaufort descent supplied the Lancastrian element of the Tudor claim.
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 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 |
Blanche of Lancaster has 1 recorded child: Henry IV of England.
Blanche of Lancaster married John of Gaunt.
Blanche of Lancaster is recorded as Duchess of Lancaster in the Plantagenet family tree.
Blanche of Lancaster's recorded native place is Bolingbroke, England.
0 ancestors and 4 descendants of Blanche of Lancaster are recorded so far, within a tree of 50 people.
Blanche of Lancaster is recorded as Henry II of England's 7 steps away.
Blanche of Lancaster is recorded in the Plantagenet family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 49 other people.
Trace Blanche of Lancaster's connections across the Plantagenettree, or begin preserving your own family's history today.
Free. Private by default. GEDCOM export any time.