How Meghan’s ancestor Wisdom escaped the sha ckles of slavery
Ahead of her Irish visit we look at Meghan Markle’s fascinating family tree and discover a history that makes her one of the most unusual royal family members to grace Buckingham Palace
AVA Burrows, is a charming retired teacher who lives in a remote desert town in California. She also happens to have a very famous stepgranddaughter. ‘Meggie marrying a prince? Who’d have thunk!’ she laughs, slapping her thigh. ‘I guess it’s like your Downtown Abbey — and we’re the folks downstairs.’ The perfect analogy, perhaps.
Mrs Burrows was the second wife of Meghan Markle’s late grandfather, Alvin, And that’s just a taster of the complex web of relationships involving Prince Harry’s new in-laws. Meghan’s family has a fascinating heritage, involving both poor European immigrants to the US and victims of the African slave trade.
Mrs Burrows agrees that it’s an unusual mix of individuals.
‘Compared to other people’s families, perhaps it is quite complicated,’ she told me, chuckling at this obvious understatement.
So where exactly do these ‘downstairs folk’ come from?
Meghan descends on her father’s side from Irish and Dutch immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania, while her mother’s ancestors were slaves who toiled on the cotton plantations of the Deep South.
Her paternal great-grandfather, ‘Papa Ike’ Markle, reputedly stood 7ft 2in tall and was immensely strong — a trait passed down through the generations.
Meghan’s father, Thomas Senior, now aged 72, stands 6ft 3in and weighs well over 20st thanks to a weakness for junk food. While her burly brother, Thomas Junior, is only fractionally shorter.
Meghan’s paternal grandfather, Gordon, worked on the railroads and her grandmother, Doris — the much-loved family matriarch — served behind the counter in what Americans used to call a ‘five and dime store’.
They were a typical, small-town, blue-collar family: hard-working, God-fearing, self-reliant — and upwardly mobile.
(One of Meghan’s paternal uncles, Fred, 75, is an Eastern Orthodox Catholic priest. As a young man, he would baptise new additions to the family in the local river. Her other uncle, 77-year-old Mick, held senior public service posts and is now comfortably retired on the Oregon coast.)
After leaving school, Meghan’s father earned a pittance setting up the pins at the local bowling alley, but his ambition was to work as a stage technician. By age 20, he had moved to Chicago, where he found work in theatres and eventually rose to become an award-winning cinematographer.
Meghan’s father was barely 20 years old when he met his first wife, Roslyn, an alluring redhead who was just out of high school.
When they married, she was pregnant with the first of their two children, Samantha, who is now 53. Then came Meghan’s halfbrother, Thomas Jr, 51.
They lived in the bohemian Chicago suburb of Hyde Park, embracing the free and easy 1960s culture and roaming around in a battered blue camper van.
According to one source, though, Thomas Markle was not yet ready to settle down and become a father and husband, and within eight years, the hippyish marriage was over. Meghan’s half-siblings moved to New Mexico with their mother; her father headed for Hollywood, where he partied and worked his way up in the movie industry with equal vigour.
He was in his mid-30s and an established television lighting director when he fell for Doria Ragland, a beautiful assistant make-up artist 12 years his junior.
Doria’s ancestors were slaves, and her great-great-great-great grandfather had been put to work in the Georgia plantations.
He was emancipated in 1865 after Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery. Permitted to choose a new surname to mark his freedom, he selected Wisdom.
THEREAFTER, successive generations of the family — black, white and of mixed race — strove to better themselves, working as maids, janitors, tailors and factory-hands in Georgia and Tennessee, before Meghan’s greataunt, Dora, joined the professional classes when she became a teacher.
Dora’s nephew Alvin — Meghan’s maternal grandfather — was an antiques dealer with a fine collection of vintage American cars. (He later divorced his first wife, who is Meghan’s grandmother, and married the aforementioned Ava Burrows.)
Meghan’s mother and father, Doria Ragland and Thomas Markle, married in Thomas’s home state of Pennsylvania in 1979. Within two years, on August 4, 1981, Rachel Meghan Markle was born. (Meghan went by the name Rachel until her late teens.)
From her father, she inherited the distinctive Markle nose, with its quirky kink near the tip.
Her mother gave her the dark, seductive eyes she uses to such devastating effect on the television series Suits, in which she plays the character Rachel Zane, along with her wavy hair (which she straightened after becoming an actress) and what she describes as her ‘caramel’ complexion.
From the moment they saw Meghan, her parents adored her.
‘When Meggie was born, Dad was a completely changed man,’ recalls her half-brother, Thomas Jr, who was then 14 and had recently left New Mexico for California to live with his father and stepmother and his new baby sister.
‘Before then, Dad’s work took priority over everything, but she became his whole world. I remember when she came home from the hospital, he had decorated the bathroom with little angels and fairies.
‘He would keep holding her up to the mirror so she could see herself in his arms. The look on his face was priceless. Dad would take so many pictures of Meggie. He must have about 50,000 pictures of her stashed away somewhere.
‘Meggie was a little princess long before she met Harry — she was her Daddy’s princess.’
Going to work on hit TV series such as General Hospital — for which her father won an Emmy Award — and Married With Children, Thomas Markle would take her with him on set, and the stars made a fuss of her.
Then, when her school — first the private Hollywood Little Red Schoolhouse and then an exclusive all-girls Catholic school — put on plays, Thomas Markle would volunteer to do the lighting.
It’s certainly true that from an early age, Meghan wanted to be an actress, and her father aimed to give her all the help he could.
Family members say that her half-sister Samantha, who is 16 years older and had harboured the same ambitions, felt she wasn’t getting as much assistance as Meghan, which fuelled a deepening jealousy that had been present from the start.
Along with her brother Thomas Jr, Samantha had been raised by her mother in the backwoods of New Mexico.
For her, there was no private education, and no tip-toeing downstairs to charm guests at glamorous parties.
Around the time that Meghan was born, however, Samantha had moved back in with her father, hoping he would give her the entrée into Hollywood that she longed for.
With her long blonde hair and blue eyes, Samantha certainly had the looks. And according to her brother and mother, her father did what he could for her — but she was not prepared to put in the required effort.
‘Samantha wanted to earn the big money — that’s all she has ever been interested in,’ says Thomas Jr, who makes no secret of his loathing for his sister. ‘She thought that because she came from a showbusiness family she was going to be a Hollywood star, and it doesn’t work like that. ‘The only jobs she got were a jeans commercial and a couple of walk-on parts in General Hospital. She became very sour — and she still is.’ While Thomas Jr played
with Meghan and took her to the park to feed the ducks, he claims his sister flatly refused to have anything to do with her.
Samantha also despised her stepmother, Doria, Thomas Jr claims, and was so embarrassed that she was black that she’d tell people she was the maid.
In her late teens, Samantha moved out of the family home and has been estranged from Meghan for years.
This explains why Samantha has said such cruel things about Meghan since her relationship with Harry became public, Thomas Jr says.
She accused Meghan of being ‘self-obsessed’ and claimed she had failed to support her family after making her name on TV.
She even said that Meghan ‘hid’ the fact that Samantha uses a wheelchair because she suffers from multiple sclerosis. Though Samantha fired off some of these barbs on social media, and they were widely reported, she has since denied making them. Meghan, to her immense credit, has never alluded to this domestic discord. Instead, she paints an almost idyllic picture of her childhood. Even her parents’ divorce, in March 1987, when she was five, does not appear to have adversely affected her. Doria and Thomas Sr were awarded joint custody, the agreement being that she would live mainly with her mother, and spend some weeks and summer holidays with her father. Family friends say Doria worked for a time as a flight attendant so she was frequently away from home.
Although Meghan travelled with her mother to places such as Mexico and Jamaica — and it was the appalling conditions in some of these countries that she has said helped to develop her social conscience — it meant that she lived with her father for much of the time.
Thomas Markle Sr was then earning top dollar in Hollywood. Curiously, though, I am told, he has never owned his own house.
They would live in shabby, rented apartments situated near whatever studios he was working for, and drive around Los Angeles in clapped-out old bangers.
Between the ages of eight and 18, Meghan lived in a second-floor flat on Vista Del Mar Street, a short walk from Hollywood Boulevard, with its neon lights and iconic landmarks. It sounds like every young girl’s dream. But in reality it was then a depressingly seedy area.
However, Meghan had much to be thankful for. Not least her first class education. At her exclusive Catholic girls’ high school, Immaculate Heart, she was always top of the class, or near it.
When it came to voting for the school president — the equivalent of a head girl — Meghan won hands down. She was so popular, and pretty, that she was also crowned Homecoming Queen — a muchcoveted prize among female high school students.
So much about her was perfect, contemporaries recall — even her handwriting. Indeed, one of her earliest jobs was as a calligrapher.
‘Meghan was gifted in many ways, but the thing I really admired about her was that she would fight, tooth and nail, for the things she wanted in life,’ says Sonia Ardakani, the mother of Suzy, her best friend at school.
By Meghan’s own account, her sense of social awareness developed at an early age. At 11, she was appalled by the inherent sexism in a soap powder advertisement, which stated that ‘women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans’.
So she fired off protest letters to the company and to prominent women including Hillary Clinton. The wording of the advertisement was duly changed to ‘people’.
MEGHAN has also spoken of the racial prejudice and ignorance she encountered in her youth. In one ugly incident, she heard a white woman call her mother ‘the Nword’ during a parking dispute.
Mrs Ardakani is unsurprised. Racism was still so rife in their area of Los Angeles in the Eighties and Nineties, she told me, that non-whites faced hostile stares when they walked into restaurants and other public places.
Black and Hispanic parents would be told the register was full when attempting to enrol their children in certain schools.
Meghan’s father did his utmost to help her deal with this prejudice and teach her to take pride in her ethnic background.
And once, when she came home from school confused, having been asked to tick a box stating her ethnicity — the options being black, white, Hispanic or Asian — he told her: ‘Next time, you draw your own box.’ Meghan took his advice.
In a revealing article written for Elle magazine in 2015, she spoke of the struggles growing up with a black mother and white father.
‘You create the identity you want for yourself, just as my ancestors did when they were given their freedom.
‘Because, in 1865 —– which is so shatteringly recent — when slavery was abolished in the United States, former slaves had to choose a name. A surname to be exact.
‘Perhaps the closest thing connecting me to my ever-complex family tree, my longing to know where I come from, and the commonality that links me to my bloodline, is the choice that my great-great-great-great grandfather made to start anew. He chose the last name “Wisdom”. He drew his own box.’
Today, Meghan is, in her own words, ‘a strong, confident, mixed race woman’ who, as she told Pride, a lifestyle magazine for ‘women of colour’, felt an ‘obligation’ to speak about being half-black.
She is also very aware of her good fortune, saying in 2015: ‘I dream pretty big, but truly had no idea my life could be this awesome.
‘I am the luckiest girl in the world, without question.’