We're all well-acquainted with Pippa, James, Carole and Michael...but meet another addition to the former-Kate Middleton's family tree: Jane Austen. Yes, that Jane Austen, of Pride and Prejudice fame.
Ancestry.com, the world's largest online family history resource, discovered the good news -- the two ladies are linked by one Henry Percy, Catherine's 16th great-grandfather and Jane Austen's 10th great-grandfather, making them 11th cousins, six times removed.
From a press release:
Percy, the ancestor who connects Catherine and Jane, was born in 1392 at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, England. Percy was a 2nd great-grandson of King Edward III - meaning that King Edward is also a distant great-grandfather of Catherine Middleton.
Spending his youth in Scotland, because his father and grandfather were killed fighting against King Henry IV of England, in his early twenties, Percy reconciled with King Henry V (after Henry IV's death) and was tasked with protecting the Scottish border. He was killed in 1455 during the first battle of the Wars of the Roses, at St. Albans, England. The Wars of the Roses were a series of English civil wars fought over the English throne.
Anastasia Harman, Lead Family Historian for Ancestry.com, remarked, "Finding this connection between the Duchess of Cambridge and Jane Austen is very exciting since, in many ways, Catherine is the modern Jane Austen heroine: a middle class girl marrying the future King of England. Jane Austen may have written about happily-ever-after but it seems Catherine has found a nonfiction hero to spend her life with -- far past the epilogue.
Austen isn't the duchess' only famous cousin. Check out who else Catherine is related to here.