My latest "Famous family trees" blog has just been published on the Findmypast website at: http://blog.findmypast.co.uk/2013/06/famous-family-trees-clare-balding/ The subject of my latest researches is the TV presenter and Channel 4 racing presenter CLARE BALDING, whose ancestry is rather colourful. Through her mother, she is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror and of seven other medieval monarchs. Some of her ancestors met sticky ends through execution, among them her 14th great-grandfather George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, who, as Shakespeare had it, was drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine. Her 13th great-grandmother was Margaret Countess of Salisbury, who was messily beheaded as a Catholic martyr at 67 on the orders of Henry VIII in 1541. She descends from the Earls of Derby, one of whom founded the Epsom Derby and The Oaks, and her royal descent is through the Earls of Huntingdon. She descends also from the Plantagenets who were deeply involved in the Wars of the Roses. What particularly intrigued me, though, was discovering that she is one-quarter American through her paternal grandmother, Eleanor Hoagland, a New York society heiress who married Clare's grandfather, Gerald Matthews Balding, a well-known English polo player in America in the 1930s, in New York in 1935. The Hoagland family's entry in the US 1920 census can be seen as part of the blog. Her American ancestry can be traced back to a Dutch immigrant into what was then New Amsterdam in 1634. Her great-great-great-grandfather, Joseph Christoffel Hoagland (1841-1899) founded in 1873 what became the largest baking powder manufacturer in America. The ancestry comes through Clare's father, Ian Balding, trainer of some of the Queen's horses, who is half-American through his mother Eleanor Hoagland, having been born in America in 1938. As far as I can see, I don't think anyone has gone into Clare Balding's American ancestry in any detail before. -- Roy Stockdill Genealogical researcher, writer & lecturer Famous family trees blog: http://blog.findmypast.co.uk/tag/roy-stockdill/ "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." OSCAR WILDE