King's Daughters...Made Famous

The interesting thing about ancestry is that when you start researching, you never know who you’re going to find…

Those hand-picked French brides, selected for marriage in the New World, were more or less anonymous ladies of whom no one had really heard much about. Their business was, to put it simply, help populate the land, with no particular glory or fame attached to this. Of course, history has it that these ladies are greatly responsible for the magnitude of their contribution to the making of a new country; hence rendering them a particularly interesting topic of interest and research.


Although these ladies lived their lives without notoriety, they would have probably been very surprised to know that many North Americans of today make note of this particular time in history and are proud to trace back their ancestry to the King’s Daughters.


We might even know a few…for starters: Hillary Clinton, Angelina Jolie and Madonna. All of these well-known people have French ancestry descending from the King’s Daughters. Hillary, in particular, is a descendant of three of these ladies.


Les filles du roi may not have known to what degree their contribution would affect history, or how far and wide their lineage did in fact, stretch; but the ongoing research for ancestral purposes proves that people are truly fascinated by Les filles du roi.


Ironically, these once anonymous ladies are the source of today’s ongoing fame and popularity.


For more information please see the following sources for the specific research and data:

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s French-Canadian Connection: Detroit and Michigan Connection. Article by Gail Moreau-Desharnais and Diane Wolford Sheppard, FHSM Members http://fchsm.habitant.org/Clinton.pdf

Angelina Jolie by Diane Sheppard http://fchsm.habitant.org/MHHContents.pdf

Madonna's ancestry, the work of Gail Moreau-DesHarnais and René Jetté Michigan's Habitant Heritage, Journal of the French-Canadian Heritage Society of Michigan 1994 Madonna http://www.lamadonnatheque.com/femme/genealogie/genealogie02.html