Public Family Trees/Rothschild/James Mayer de Rothschild
1792 - 1868 · Male · Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Son of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and Gutle Rothschild
3
Generation
2
Ancestors
12
Descendants
3
Children
1
Marriages
James Mayer de Rothschild, born Jakob in Frankfurt in 1792, was the youngest son of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and the founder of the Paris house, de Rothschild Freres. He arrived in France in 1811 and became the dominant private banker of the Restoration, the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, lending to successive French governments, building the Chemin de Fer du Nord railway and buying Chateau Lafite in 1868. He m…
Born1792
Born to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, Gutle Rothschild.
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3 children recorded in this branch.
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Died1868
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Gen 3 · 1803 - 1874
Anselm Salomon von Rothschild was the only son of Salomon Mayer von Rothschild and the second head of the Vienna house. Born in Frankfurt in 1803, he trained in his uncles' banks and represented the family in Frankfurt for years before taking over in Vienna on his father's death in 1855, the year he helped found the Creditanstalt, which became the largest bank in Austria-Hungary. He sat in the Austrian upper house and was a notable collector of arms, armour and Renaissance objects. He married his first cousin Charlotte, daughter of Nathan Mayer Rothschild of London; their children included Ferdinand and Alice of Waddesdon Manor, Albert who succeeded him in Vienna, and the composer Mathilde.
Gen 3 · 1808 - 1879
Lionel de Rothschild led the London house of N M Rothschild and Sons for more than forty years and broke the bar on Jews sitting in Parliament. Born in London in 1808, the eldest son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, he took charge of the bank on his father's death in 1836, issued loans for the British, French, Russian and other governments, raised money for Irish famine relief, and in 1875 advanced the funds for Britain to buy the Suez Canal shares for Disraeli's government. Elected for the City of London in 1847, he was repeatedly refused his seat because he would not swear a Christian oath, and finally took it in 1858 after the law was changed. He married his Naples cousin Charlotte.
Gen 5 · 1844 - 1911
Baron Albert Salomon von Rothschild was the third head of the Vienna house, succeeding his father Anselm in 1874. Born in Vienna in 1844, he ran S. M. von Rothschild as the dominant private bank of Austria-Hungary, financed the Nordbahn railway and the Vitkovice ironworks, and became one of the wealthiest men in the empire. He was a serious amateur astronomer and photographer who paid for an observatory on the Kahlenberg above Vienna, and a steady patron of the city's charities. He married his Paris cousin Bettina, daughter of Alphonse de Rothschild, and was the father of Louis Nathaniel, the last head of the Vienna bank. He died in 1911.
Gen 5 · 1868 - 1937
Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, was a zoologist and the addressee of the Balfour Declaration. Born in London in 1868, the elder son of the 1st Baron, he worked in the family bank for a time but gave his life to natural history, building at Tring a museum and a collection of some two million specimens, including the largest private bird collection ever assembled, and naming thousands of new species with his curators. He was famous in London for the zebras he trained to pull a carriage. As president of the Zionist Federation he received the British government's 1917 letter supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine. He left his museum to the nation and died in 1937.
Gen 5 · 1877 - 1923
Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, known as Charles, was a banker by profession and one of the founders of British nature conservation. Born in London in 1877, the younger son of the 1st Baron Rothschild, he worked as a partner in N M Rothschild and Sons while becoming the leading authority on fleas, describing hundreds of species including the oriental rat flea that carries plague. In 1912 he founded the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, the ancestor of the Wildlife Trusts, and drew up the first national list of sites worth protecting in Britain. He married Rozsika von Wertheimstein in 1907; their children included Miriam, Victor and Nica. He died in 1923.
Gen 6 · 1908 - 2005
Dame Miriam Rothschild was a naturalist of international standing who never attended university. Born in 1908, the eldest child of Charles Rothschild and Rozsika, she continued her father's work on fleas, publishing the six volume catalogue of the Rothschild flea collection and showing how the flea's jump is powered, and she worked on butterflies, parasites and the chemical defences of insects. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985. A campaigner for wildflower meadows and for conservation, she lived at Ashton Wold in Northamptonshire, married George Lane in 1943, and died in 2005.
Gen 6 · 1909 - 2007
Baron Guy de Rothschild rebuilt the French house after the Second World War. Born in Paris in 1909, the son of Edouard de Rothschild, he was decorated for his service with the French army in 1940, escaped to London to join the Free French, and returned to find the bank seized and the family's property looted. He led de Rothschild Freres from 1949, modernised it, and developed the Le Nickel mining company and the Imetal group, before the bank was nationalised by the Mitterrand government in 1981 and the family had to start again. A leading owner of racehorses and master of the Chateau de Ferrieres, he died in Paris in 2007.
Gen 6 · 1926 - 1997
Baron Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild founded the Swiss based banking group that still carries his name. Born in Paris in 1926, the only son of Maurice de Rothschild, he spent the war years in Switzerland and then built his inherited fortune into La Compagnie Financiere Edmond de Rothschild, a private bank in Geneva and Paris with interests in hotels, wine, agriculture and shipping. He was a major investor in Israel, where he backed industrial development and the Caesarea Development Corporation, and he owned Chateau Clarke in Bordeaux. His son Benjamin succeeded him on his death in 1997.
Gen 7 · 1936 - 2024
Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, was a financier and one of Britain's most influential patrons of the arts. Born in London in 1936, the son of Victor, 3rd Baron Rothschild, he worked in the family bank until he left in 1980 after disagreeing with his cousin Evelyn over its direction, then built RIT Capital Partners into one of the largest investment trusts in London. He chaired the trustees of the National Gallery and the National Heritage Memorial Fund, restored Waddesdon Manor and Spencer House, and chaired Yad Hanadiv in Israel, which built the Supreme Court in Jerusalem. He married Serena Dunn in 1961 and was succeeded in 2024 by their son Nathaniel.
Gen 7 · b. 1942
Baron David Rene de Rothschild led the family's French and British banking businesses back together into a single firm. Born in Paris in 1942, the son of Guy de Rothschild, he joined the family bank in the 1960s, and after the French house was nationalised in 1981 he rebuilt the business from almost nothing as Rothschild and Cie Banque. He became chairman of the Rothschild group in 2003, merged the London and Paris arms, took the group to the stock market as Rothschild and Co in 2012, and handed the executive chairmanship to his son Alexandre in 2018. He has also been a leading figure in French Jewish institutions.
Gen 4 · 1837 - 1911
Leonora de Rothschild was the eldest daughter of Lionel de Rothschild and Charlotte, born in London in 1837. In 1857 she married her French cousin Mayer Alphonse de Rothschild, a wedding that joined the London and Paris houses once again in her own generation. She lived in Paris and at the Chateau de Ferrieres as one of the leading hostesses of the Second Empire and the early Third Republic, took a close interest in the family's charities, and was a patron of music. She was the mother of Edouard de Rothschild, who later led the French house, and of Bettina, who married into the Vienna branch. She died in 1911.
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 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 House of Medici was a Florentine banking family and political dynasty that rose from mercantile wealth in the late fourteenth century to dominate the Republic of Florence, produced two popes and two queens of France, and ruled as hereditary Grand Dukes of Tuscany for nearly two centuries before the direct male line died out in 1737. ## Origins The family's fortune began with Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, who founded the Medici Bank around 1397 and built it into one of the most trusted financial institutions in Europe through close ties to the papacy. His son Cosimo de' Medici turned that wealth into political dominance of Florence without ever holding a formal princely title, ruling through alliance, patronage, and public opinion for three decades. Cosimo's descendants, especially his grandson Lorenzo de' Medici, known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, consolidated the family's grip on the city while becoming the era's foremost patrons of Renaissance art and humanist scholarship. ## Notable Members Lorenzo the Magnificent's sons included Giovanni, who became Pope Leo X, the first Medici pope, and whose cousin Giulio later reigned as Pope Clement VII. Lorenzo's granddaughter Catherine de' Medici became queen of France and, as regent, steered the country through the Wars of Religion; a later Medici, Marie de' Medici, likewise became queen of France as the second wife of Henry IV. When the senior line failed with the assassination of Alessandro de' Medici in 1537, the family's junior branch, descended from Cosimo the Elder's brother, provided Cosimo I de' Medici, who was crowned the first Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1569. His descendants, including the scientific patrons Cosimo II and Ferdinando II, ruled Tuscany until Gian Gastone de' Medici, the last Grand Duke, died without an heir in 1737. His sister, Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, outlived him as the family's final member. ## Significance Beyond their political rule, the Medici reshaped European culture through unmatched patronage: they backed Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo Galilei, and financed the buildings, art, and institutions that still define Florence today. Anna Maria Luisa's 1737 Patto di Famiglia bequeathed the family's entire art collection to the Tuscan state on the condition it never leave Florence, directly founding the holdings of the Uffizi Gallery and Pitti Palace. | Fact | Details | |---|---| | Founded | c. 1397, Florence (Medici Bank) | | Founder | Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici | | Seat | Florence; later the Grand Duchy of Tuscany | | Peak title | Grand Duke of Tuscany (from 1569) | | Popes produced | Leo X (1513-1521), Clement VII (1523-1534) | | Queens of France | Catherine de' Medici, Marie de' Medici | | Dynasty ended | 1737 (Gian Gastone); 1743 (Anna Maria Luisa) | | Lasting legacy | Uffizi Gallery and Pitti Palace collections |
James Mayer de Rothschild's recorded parents are Mayer Amschel Rothschild, Gutle Rothschild.
James Mayer de Rothschild has 3 recorded children: Mayer Alphonse de Rothschild, Gustave Samuel de Rothschild, Edmond Benjamin James de Rothschild.
James Mayer de Rothschild married Betty de Rothschild.
James Mayer de Rothschild has 9 recorded siblings: Jeannette Rothschild, Amschel Mayer von Rothschild, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, Isabella Rothschild, Babette Rothschild, Carl Mayer von Rothschild, Julie Rothschild, Henriette Rothschild.
James Mayer de Rothschild is recorded as Banker, founder of the Paris house in the Rothschild family tree.
James Mayer de Rothschild's recorded native place is Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
2 ancestors and 12 descendants of James Mayer de Rothschild are recorded so far, within a tree of 50 people.
James Mayer de Rothschild is recorded as Mayer Amschel Rothschild's Son.
James Mayer de Rothschild is recorded in the Rothschild family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 49 other people.
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