![]() ![]() How likely is it that you, too, might have some royal connections lurking somewhere in your ancestry? Actress Brooke Shields learned she was descended from French royalty, while actresses Hilary Duff and Uma Thurman are distantly related the British royal family. Supermodel Cindy Crawford is a distant descendant of the King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne. In recent years, the popular BBC TV series Who Do You Think You Are has seen numerous public figures discover to their shock that they have distant royal connections of their own. That made it a much more powerful moment." "But I was one of the few who has actual tangible DNA in common with him. "The unique thing that really struck me was just how many people must be descended from Richard III's family," he says. As he gazed upon his ancestor's skeleton ahead of a reinternment ceremony in Leicester Cathedral in 2015, he reflected on the sheer improbability of it all. "It's not a direct line, because we were traced down his sister's female line, but basically he's a great-uncle 17 times removed."įor Ibsen, a 66-year-old carpenter and furniture-maker living in North London, it seemed like a remarkable coincidence. "We had no idea that we would be part of the process of finding Richard III's remains," says Ibsen. Hidden within his DNA were genetic sequences that came from the royal line. When the suspected remains of Richard III were discovered underneath a Leicester car park in 2012, it was a sample of Ibsen's spit that helped to confirm the long-dead king's identity. After she passed away, it was her son, Michael Ibsen, who found himself thrust into an extraordinary detective story. In 2004, she was contacted by a British historian: she had been identified as a descendant of Richard III, England's last Plantagenet king. But for all her efforts, there was one key piece of information that she missed. Using digital census records, birth certificates and marriage documents, she painstakingly traced her family's ancestry back to the 14th Century. Joy Ibsen, a retired Canadian journalist, had been an avid amateur geneaologist. ![]()
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