Twenty-eight generations of bloodline — from the founding Plantagenet union of Anjou and the Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, through the barons of Magna Carta, the warriors of Agincourt, the planters of colonial Norwalk, and the long American century that followed.
Every family carries a chronicle, but few carry one so unbroken or so consequential as this. The descent traced upon these pages begins not with a farmer or a tradesman, but with a marriage of two of the most ambitious figures of the twelfth century: Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, called Plantagenet, and the Empress Matilda, daughter and only legitimate surviving child of King Henry I of England. Their son became Henry II, first of the Plantagenet kings, and from that single union poured the long river of blood that, twenty-eight generations later, would arrive in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The story is told here not as a heraldic boast but as a genealogical fact, documented across nineteen distinct lines of descent — meaning that on nineteen separate occasions, the bloodline of medieval England forked and rejoined through later marriages, until the streams converged again in the colonial households of Norwalk, Connecticut. Charlotte St. John alone carries the royal blood through eight separate ancestral paths. Captain Daniel Hanford carries it through eleven. By the time it reaches Jack Hanford, the great-grandfather of this chronicle's subject, the royal descent crosses through him on all nineteen lines.
"On whose forehead climb the crowns of the world."
What follows is the careful work of years: a genealogical project built atop primary sources — the chronicles of medieval England, the patent rolls of the Plantagenet kings, the parish registers of Norfolk and Suffolk, the freeman lists of Norwalk, the burial inscriptions of New England graveyards, and the deeds, wills, and family histories of every generation in between. Where the record is silent, that silence is noted. Where chroniclers contradict one another, both voices are recorded. The aim has been not to flatter the bloodline but to know it.
The chronicle opens, as all such chronicles must, with the kings.
Of all the medieval sovereigns whose blood flows through this chronicle, none is more consequential — nor more pervasive — than Edward I of England, called Longshanks for his uncommon height. He stands at the apex of every single one of the nineteen distinct lines of descent that converge, seven centuries later, in John Schalcosky. He is not merely an ancestor; he is the cornerstone of the entire descent.
Born at Westminster on 17 June 1239 to Henry III and Eleanor of Provence, Edward grew to be England's most formidable medieval monarch. At six feet two inches, he towered over his contemporaries. He crushed the Welsh princes, absorbed the Principality of Wales permanently into the English crown, and in 1301 bestowed the title Prince of Wales upon his heir — a custom that endures to this day. He campaigned relentlessly in Scotland, earning the epithet Hammer of the Scots, and was marching northward on yet another Scottish campaign when dysentery took him at Burgh-by-Sands on 7 July 1307, aged sixty-eight.
As a lawgiver, Edward reshaped England. The Statutes of Westminster, the Statute of Mortmain, the Statute of Gloucester — his legislative output rivals any English monarch before or since. He summoned the Model Parliament of 1295, the prototype of the representative assemblies that would eventually become Parliament as we know it. His reforming judges rode every circuit; his writs reached every manor.
But it is his children — and their marriages — that explain his extraordinary presence in this genealogy. By his beloved first wife Eleanor of Castile, who died in 1290 as he rushed to her bedside, Edward had many children, of whom several survived to adulthood and married into the great noble houses of England: Elizabeth of Rhuddlan (who married Humphrey de Bohun, 4th Earl of Hereford), and Joan of Acre (who married Gilbert de Clare, 7th Earl of Gloucester). By his second wife Margaret of France, he fathered Edmund of Woodstock, 1st Earl of Kent — ancestor of Joan of Kent and the Holland Dukes of Exeter. Each of these children became a branching point; each branch forked again and again across the following centuries, until nineteen separate paths reached the same colonial households in Norwalk, Connecticut.
The Eleanor Crosses — twelve of them, raised at every overnight stop along the route her funeral cortège travelled from Nottinghamshire to Westminster — remain among the most eloquent monuments in English history. Three still stand: at Geddington, Hardingstone, and Waltham Cross. They were not acts of state policy, but grief, made in stone.
Effigies, illuminations, portraits, daguerreotypes, photographs — the faces of the bloodline arranged across eight centuries. Click any image for the full record.
The royal blood reaches John Schalcosky not by a single thread but by nineteen — each line beginning with a Plantagenet ancestor and arriving, generations later, in the same New England household. Where the lines cross, they reinforce. Each is shown here in the briefest form.
Five hinges upon which the entire descent turned — battles, marriages, and acts of state without which this chronicle would not exist.
Blanche of Lancaster, sole heiress to the greatest fortune in England, married John of Gaunt, third surviving son of Edward III. From their three children would descend the House of Lancaster, the Tudors — and the ancestors of nearly half of this chronicle.
English forces under Thomas Howard crushed the Scottish army of King James IV. Several knights related to the line — Brandons, Howards, Wingfields — were present.
William de Bohun, Earl of Northampton — Generation 22 of this descent — commanded the right wing at Crécy. The longbows of English yeomen destroyed the flower of French chivalry, and the sixteen-year-old Black Prince won his spurs in the front rank.
Captain Daniel Hanford watched Tryon's redcoats put Norwalk to the torch. He had already endured imprisonment in the Sugar House Prison at New York. The shoe preserved here was reportedly his.
Sir Robert Goushill, husband of Elizabeth FitzAlan and direct ancestor at Generation 20, fell at the Battle of Shrewsbury fighting for Henry IV against Henry Percy "Hotspur." Their tomb at Hoveringham survives.
King John — Generation 26 — affixed his seal to the Great Charter at Runnymede. Twenty-five barons stood surety; through later marriages, the blood of several of those barons would join the royal line and reach this descent.
The descent in its modern phase — from late-Victorian Connecticut to present-day Pennsylvania. With Jack Hanford, all nineteen lines unify; with the generations that follow, the chronicle becomes a family.
The generation in which the chronicle of kings becomes, at last, simply a family. By his day the converging royal lines had narrowed nearly to a single stream. He married Bella Hart — May Belle Farver — whose own ancestry carried a separate descent from Edward I; in their union two independent royal lines from the same medieval king met again after six centuries apart.
An actress who carried one of the most remarkable threads in the whole genealogy. Her descent from Edward I runs by an entirely different route — through Joan of Acre, the de Clare and Despenser lines, the bastardised FitzAlan branch, the de Vere earls of Oxford, and Peter Montague, a colonial emigrant to Virginia — before reaching the American generations and herself.
The point of convergence. In Jack Hanford, for the first time, all nineteen distinct lines of descent from King Edward I come together in a single person — the New England lines through Norwalk and Massachusetts Bay, the Hudson-valley Dutch connection, and the Virginia line carried by his mother. The long arithmetic of pedigree collapse completes its work in him.
Wife of the man in whom the nineteen lines converge, she shares with him the threshold generation between the long medieval chronicle and the living family — the point at which kings and crusaders give way to grandparents and family photographs.
Daughter of the convergence generation, she carries the now-unified inheritance — all nineteen lines gathered into one — forward into the living family, two generations removed from the chronicler of this descent.
Mother of the chronicler, she joins the long Hanford line — carrying the gathered royal inheritance of Edward I — to her own Donato and Donatelli ancestry, reaching back to the mountain villages of the Abruzzo, in the province of L'Aquila. In her, the kings of England and the shepherds of the Apennines meet.
The subject and chronicler of this descent — some twenty-eight generations from Geoffrey of Anjou and twenty-six to twenty-eight from Edward I. Through years of primary-source research he has stitched the nineteen lines back together, and here the long chronicle that began among the Plantagenet kings comes quietly to rest.
The principal authorities behind every claim made on this site.