31 Tracing Royal Roots: William the Conquerer

 William the Conqueror – My Paternal 26th Great-Grandfather

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 31 – July 29, 2025

Prompt: Earliest Ancestor

I’ve traced many lines of my family tree back through time, some with painstaking care, others with the help of modern DNA tools or digitized records. But it was in the local library—quiet, old-school research—that I stumbled onto perhaps my most surprising “find” yet: William the Conqueror, my paternal 26th great-grandfather.

It happened while I was researching in the genealogy section of the Hardesty Regional Library, a branch of the Tulsa City-County Library system and home to their excellent genealogy collection. I was flipping through the multi-volume set Royal Ancestry by Douglas Richardson, trying to verify a possible connection I had uncovered to English royalty. Bit by bit, the line held together, generation by generation, until—there he was—William I of England, Duke of Normandy, victor at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and the first Norman king of England.

I turned to the man seated at the next table and said, probably a little too proudly, “It looks like I descend from William the Conqueror.”

He didn’t even blink.

“Honey,” he said, “if you’re white Anglo-Saxon in the United States, you descend from William the Conqueror.”

Well then. That put me right in my place—and squarely among millions of others.

And still… there’s something thrilling about seeing it in print. Knowing that this towering figure in European history appears in my direct line, no matter how distant. His name may appear in history books and TV dramas, but for me, now, he also appears on my tree.