It’s easy to assume that Peerage and Heritage records are irrelevant to your genealogical research, but in fact almost half the UK population have Royal blood, which means that you may well have Dukes, Lords or other members of the nobility in your family tree.  It was quite common for the younger children of high nobility to marry Lords or Barons, and for the youngest children of these to marry a professional such as a doctor or lawyer and so forth.

TheGenealogist provides an extensive collection of peerage records such as Burkes and Debretts, as well as Knights of England 1127 to 1904, which records the Knights of all the Orders of Chivalry in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and Heraldic Visitations, which document entire family trees. 

Twin brothers in the Yorkshire Visitation records

You can also find out if you’re related to the Royal family with our new dataset ‘The Blood Royal of Britain’.  These records were compiled by the Marquis of Ruvigny and Raineval, originally published in 1903, and were the first to try and document every descendent of former British monarchs.  Arranged in order of primogeniture, some entries also contain dates of births, marriages and deaths.   Currently available are the Plantagenent Roll, with the descendents of Edward III up until the mid-Nineteenth Century, and the Tudor Roll with descendents of Edward IV (1441-83), Henry VII (1455-1509) and James III of Scotland (1451-88). 

Included within these records is Sir Thomas Fairfax of Yorkshire, who is shown in the Blood Royal records as married to Agnes Gascoigne, grand-daughter of Henry Percy Earl of Northumberland, a direct descendent of Edward III.

Sir Thomas Fairfax and Agnes Gascoigne in the Blood Royal records

Sir Thomas Fairfax had twin sons named Nicholas and William.  As the eldest, Nicholas inherited his father’s estate, including Gilling Castle in Yorkshire, and is an ancestor of Lady Diana Spencer and her son Prince William.  The younger twin William Fairfax is the direct ancestor of William’s bride-to-be Kate Middleton. 

The new Blood Royal records are available to all Diamond subscribers on TheGenealogist, as part of our Peerage and Heritage collection.  Subscribe now to find out how Royal you are...

You can also see the direct blood line of William and Kate to Sir Thomas Fairfax and Edward III on TreeView, the free online tree builder: /treeview/demos/wills_and_kate.php

Sources: //www.wargs.com/other/middleton.html