Queen Elizabeth's Bridesmaid: A Family History Challenge



The Royal Wedding Party 1947 Princess Elizabeth II and Prince Philip (photo from "the lost gallery" on Flickr)

 On Saturday, my Uncle Gordon called me up with a challenge. I love how he is always on the look out for a family connection. If he hears about someone on the TV or reads about someone in the news with the name Rhodes or Muirhead, I inevitably get a phone call sharing the details and asking me to look into it. He's not the only family member that does that - and I accept the challenges gladly because you just never know. I mean, I wouldn't know about our family connection to the Salem witch trials if I hadn't done the exact same thing!

So the story was this. He was watching a documentary on Queen Elizabeth and it shared some details about her wedding to Prince Philip.  It turns out that one of her eight bridesmaids was a Rhodes. Any connection?? There is the challenge.

I didn't have much hope for being able to discover the personal family history of one of the wedding party from a 1947 wedding. But this one turned out to be rather easy! In fact, the bridesmaid was Margaret Elphinstone who married Denys Gravenor Rhodes in 1950. So it is his family line that I needed to research back.

There is a great website called "The Peerage" which has the family histories of the peerage of Britain as well as the royal families of Europe. His bride was the daughter of a Lord and he was the son of a Major who married the daughter of a Baron. I don't know what it takes to be included in this but they obviously have the pedigree.

I was able to then click back along the patriarchal line of Rhodes. Once you get back a couple of generations (the same generation as my great great grandfather Herbert), this Rhodes line extends into New Zealand rather than Great Britain. I wondered how far that would be and by going a couple more generations back, the line is back in England and now in Lincolnshire. Our line is from Yorkshire/Derbyshire. So I looked a bit closer and it turns out Lincolnshire William Rhodes was buried in Yorkshire. His father was from this Yorkshire area. It isn't the same area as our Rhodes - and the line ended in 1696 in Kippax, Yorkshire, West Riding, England but since I haven't taken our line back that far, it is worth keeping in my notes. My own research of our Rhodes family is back to 1796 so who knows if further research would connect us up or not. I need to get a bit more creative now - I've been lucky with census records but it has been a long time since I've done any significant research with parish records. Just one more area where there is work to be done!

You can enjoy some of the highlights of Elizabeth II's wedding here on the BBC.

Margaret Rhodes became a lady in waiting to the Queen Mother after her husband Denys' death in 1981. She has written a book about her life, being raised in Scottish aristocracy and living a life that hearkens thoughts of Downton Abbey. It's called The Final Curtsy and is now on my reading list!