This is the family of Will and Kari Davis, traced from court records, censuses, parish registers and published scholarship, with every link checked.
Between them they descend from at least forty-eight named sovereigns on Will’s side and ninety-four royal and noble ancestors on Kari’s, across ten royal houses in eight modern countries. The deepest line reaches the court of the Merovingian kings around the year 580 — some forty-five generations. Along the way: Magna Carta barons, three canonized saints, three Revolutionary War patriots, a Huguenot refugee, a Flemish physician whose book you can still read, and a Mississippi music minister whose family lore turned out to be true.
And one thing nobody expected.
Our lineages are separated by about 670 years. Will and Kari met in Texas and married on June 1, 2002. The last time their two lines were under the same roof, Edward III was on the English throne and the Black Death had not happened yet.
Bartholomew de Badlesmere (1275–1322) and Margaret de Clare had two daughters, and each one founded one side of this household. Maud married John de Vere, 7th Earl of Oxford; her descendants run through the de Vere earls and the Bullocks of Berkshire and Virginia to Will. Elizabeth married William de Bohun, 1st Earl of Northampton; hers run through the Bohuns, FitzAlans, Stanleys and Eltonheads, then Corbin, Lee, Micou and Boughan to Kari.
The two lines parted in the 1330s and did not touch again until 2002 — twenty-two generations on each side. One went to Berkshire, then tidewater Virginia, then Mississippi; the other to Lancashire, then the Rappahannock, then west Texas. In the ordinary reckoning Will and Kari are about twentieth cousins, a relationship so thin that genealogists mostly use it to describe strangers.
There is a second convergence, by two entirely separate routes: King Edward I. Kari descends from him through Elizabeth Plantagenet, Will through Alice Sergeaux. And their daughters — Elia, Hannah and Sarah Grace — descend from Bartholomew de Badlesmere twice over, once through each parent. Six hundred and seventy years is a long way to go to end up back where you started.
Both pedigrees are drawn side by side, every shared ancestor joined by a line, on the “Two Trees, Linked” page.
The Davis–Morgan line runs through Lubbock, Dallas and Jacksonville back to the preachers and farmers of Pike County, Mississippi — Rev. Andrew Fuller Davis, and before him Rev. Hosea Alexander Davis, who reached the Mississippi frontier around 1820, patented 160 acres on Ten Mile Creek, ran a mill, and served his Baptist association for forty years.
The Trenckmann–Conway line is a Texas immigration story. Andreas Friedrich Trenckmann, a Magdeburg schoolmaster who petitioned the King of Prussia during the 1848 revolution, gave up on Germany, sailed in 1853, and founded the oldest agricultural society in Texas at Cat Spring. Beside the Trenckmanns stand German-Bohemian Langhammers from Sadov and Czech Brethren families — Jancik, Skrivanek, Mašik — among them Josef Mašik, the first Czech schoolteacher in Texas, who carries a state historical marker for it.
Grandmother Joy Morgan Davis — poet, fifty-year Dallas book reviewer — often said her father was embarrassed by his illegitimate birth. She was right. William Claude Morgan, Mississippi’s Baptist state music secretary, was one of eight children Sarah Phoebe Morgan raised alone under her own surname; their father, Joseph Buchanan Kennedy, never married her.
Kari’s paternal line runs back through Geneva Byrd Boren (1923–2025) to Leonard Byrd and Thelma Hickman of Lawrence County, Tennessee, and before them to Valentine Ausburn Byrd and Ellen Aurene Tyler, married at Florence, Alabama in 1876. Ellen lived to 103. Above them, Henry Tyler Sr. and Sarah “Sally” Self married in Blount County three weeks before Alabama was a state.
The Borens go back to John Boren Sr., who died in Sumner County, Tennessee in 1814, and they explain an oddity in the record: Olin Richmond Boren’s parents were both Borens — Enoch and Alvarena, first cousins once removed, the two branches converging around 1768. One of that line, Henry B. Boren, was killed in 1868 in the Lee–Peacock Feud, the Reconstruction conflict north-east of Dallas that took about fifty lives. He was forty.
Kari’s maternal line is the deep one. Through Wanda Boughan Farmer it reaches the Boughans of Essex County, Virginia, back to James Boughan the Burgess; through Martha Ellen Micou it carries a Huguenot line to a refugee “fugitive from Nantes”; and through Mary Lee it opens the Eltonhead–Corbin descent to Edward I and the Badlesmere sisters.
Every deep line on Will’s side passes through one seventeenth-century Virginian: Captain Hugh Bullock, a London merchant-planter who sat on the Virginia Council in 1631 and held 2,550 acres in York County. Above him the chain runs to the Bullocks of Arborfield in Berkshire and to the marriage that opens everything else — Gilbert Bullock to Margaret Norreys, whose grandmother Joan de Vere was a daughter of the 12th Earl of Oxford. Genealogists call such a person a gateway ancestor. This tree has a genuine one.
Kari has two doors into Europe. Her royal descent comes through the Lee–Eltonhead line; the Boughan side opens a second, entirely independent of it. Griffing Boughan married Mary Rowzee, whose family came out of Antwerp by way of Kent. At the head of it stands Dr. Lodowick Rowzee (1590–1655), a Flemish Protestant licensed to practise physic in 1619, practising at Ashford, and author of The Queenes Welles, a 1632 treatise on the waters at Tunbridge. He is the one ancestor on either side of this family whose own words you can still open and read.
His wife Sarah Hawkins had first married John Catlett III and borne his posthumous son, Col. John Catlett, the Virginia immigrant; her son by Rowzee, Ralph, crossed to Virginia too. The half-brothers held their land in copartnership, and a 1663 deed naming “Ralph Rouzee Son of Ralph Rouzee deced” carries the line. The English half is labelled probable — proof pending, and the record that would settle it is the Ashford parish register.
Counting only rulers who are documented direct blood ancestors — grandmothers and grandfathers, not cousins — Will’s tree holds forty-eight named sovereigns and Kari’s ninety-four royal and noble ancestors. Above Edward I the two lists are largely the same people, which is what you would expect of two people descended from sisters.
Fourteen kings of England stand in the direct line, from the house of Wessex through the Conquest: Ecgberht, Æthelwulf, Alfred the Great, Edward the Elder, Edmund I, Edgar the Peaceful, Æthelred the Unready and Edmund Ironside, then William the Conqueror, Henry I, Henry II, John, Henry III and Edward I. Two ancestors, Robert de Vere and Saer de Quincy, were among the twenty-five barons who forced Magna Carta on King John — so the family stood on both sides at Runnymede. On Kari’s side, five of those twenty-five are direct ancestors.
Beyond England: the Carolingians to Charlemagne, crowned in Rome on Christmas Day 800, and behind him Charles Martel, victor of Tours, and Pepin of Landen, born about 580 — the deepest documented ancestor in the tree. The Capetians from Hugh Capet, reached three separate ways. Eight Scottish kings back to Kenneth MacAlpin, including the real Duncan that Macbeth killed. Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, who broke Viking power at Clontarf in 1014 and died in the victory, and Aoife of Leinster, whose 1170 marriage to Strongbow at Waterford sealed the Norman entry into Ireland. The Rurikids of Kiev back to St Vladimir the Great. And in Iberia, St Ferdinand III, who took Córdoba and Seville, back to Sancho Garcés I of Navarre, crowned in 905.
The royal women carried most of these lines in: Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of both France and England; Anne of Kiev, who signed her name in Cyrillic at a court that could not write; the Empress Matilda, who escaped a besieged castle across the frozen Thames; St Margaret of Scotland; Eleanor of Castile; Isabella of Angoulême; and Joan of Acre.
Each line stops where the evidence does — Wessex at 839, Scotland at 858, Navarre at 905, Kiev at about 945, the Irish kings at 935, the Norman dukes at Rollo, the de Veres at Domesday. On the modern side the Davises reach 1725 in Virginia, the Trenckmanns 1680 in Wefensleben, the Boughans a Virginia immigrant of 1655, the Rowzees Antwerp in 1590. Beyond each terminus the tree records — clearly labelled as legend — what the medieval sources themselves claimed: pedigrees running to Woden, to Míl of Spain, to King Priam of Troy, and finally to Noah, because medieval genealogists finished every royal tree at the beginning of the world.
Three Revolutionary War patriots stand in the direct line. Rev. James Smart Sr. of South Carolina is a certified DAR Patriot Ancestor, number A105556. Charles Bullock of Robeson County, North Carolina, who aided the militia, carries number A016861. Jeremiah Coney I (1730–1782) is a third candidate, pending a DAR check. This matters for the living generation: Elia, Hannah and Sarah Grace are eligible to apply to the Daughters of the American Revolution, with James Smart Sr. the most direct line.
Nearly everyone with European ancestry descends from Charlemagne. Go back 1,200 years and family trees collapse into one another; blood descent from kings is, statistically, close to universal.
What is rare is being able to prove it. Most family trees hit a wall in the 1700s or 1800s, where records thin out and surnames blur. A documented, generation-by-generation chain from a living American through a verified gateway ancestor into medieval royalty needs an unbroken run of wills, deeds, parish registers and scholarly pedigrees, every link checked. Rarer still is what this one stumbled into: two such chains, in one household, that turn out to meet — at a pair of sisters born around 1310, whose descendants found each other again in Texas seven hundred years later.
All of this lives at DavisGenealogy.com. Each side has its own landing page, written history, detailed branch document and classic family tree — the tree a chart you can zoom and pan like a map, colour-coded by rank, with world history along the bottom so you can see where the family stood at Tours, at Hastings, at Runnymede, at 1776. Two further pages join them: one tells the story of the connection, the other draws both pedigrees on one canvas with gold lines joining the thirty-seven ancestors who appear in both. Every name card is clickable, and expands to whatever is known of that person’s life. The site is kept out of search engines, but anyone with the link can open it — so share it freely.