Ahnentafel "Ancestor Table" of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York

Ahnentafel "Ancestor Table" of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York
This article is written and copyright 2008 by Will Johnson, wjhonson@aol.com.  All rights reserved.  If you see any errors, please email me!  This Knol is part of my series "Celebrity Family Trees"

Sarah Margaret Ferguson was born 15 Oct 1959 in London, the second daughter of Major Ronald Ivor Ferguson and his first wife Susan Mary Wright.  Her shortest path to a royal ancestor is that she is an 11th-generation descendant of Charles II, King of England, Scotland and Ireland. Eleven of her sixteen great-great-grandparents have royal blood, and seven of them descend from Richard Cecil.

 
Sarah states that her first home was Lowood in Berkshire, "a forty minute drive from London" with fourteen acres and two stables for horses.  She states that growing up, her sister Jane, her elder by two years, was her best friend.  Her grandfather Andrew Ferguson died of leukemia, because of this, a few years afterward, the family moved to the dairy farm Drummer Down, which Ronald had inherited.  There they had cows and horses, and several fields of crops.

"After Sarah's parents divorced in 1972, her mother remarried polo player Hector Barrantes and moved to Trenque Lauquen in the Argentine pampas. Sarah stayed at the 480-acre Dummer Down Farm at Dummer in Hampshire, her father's home since age 8. Major Ferguson remarried and had three more children." (Wikipedia)

 
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On 23 Jul 1986 at Westminster Abbey, Sarah married Andrew Albert Christian Windsor, Duke of York, the second son of Queen Elizabeth. They had two children Beatrice Elizabeth Mary Windsor born in 1988 and Eugenie Victoria Helena Windsor born in 1990. Sarah and Andrew seperated in 1992 and divorced in 1996.  Sarah was thus, for a time, the sister-in-law of Diana, Princess of Wales.  Sarah subsequently authored several children's books, most notably about the character she created: "Budgie, the little helicopter".  She also wrote dieting books and an auto-biography, was a spokesperson for Weight Watchers, and owned a public relations company.  Her autobiography, authored with Jeff Coplon is called "Sarah the Duchess of York : My Story", Simon and Schuster 1996 with a dedication "For Andrew".

Sarah leads off her autobiography with a chapter on the incident where her partly-nude photos, taken by a spying photographer, of her and John Bryan's vacation together to St Tropez, had been spread across British tabloids.

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