Given that the royal family’s current surname often flies under the radar, it might be helpful to start by clarifying what that surname actually is.
The royal’s currently go by ‘Mountbatten-Windsor.’
Windsor has been the family’s house name for centuries, but Mountbatten actually stems from the late Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip.
Philip was a Prince of Greece and Denmark, but he gave up those titles when he became a British citizen in 1947, and took the surname Mountbatten, his mother’s family name.
After taking the crown in 1952, the Queen decided to double-barrel the name of Windsor to include the nod to her husband.
But let’s take a look at the full list of potentially royal surnames:
Abel
Alden
Appleton
Ayer
Barber
Barclay
Beverly
Binney
Brooke
Brown
Campbell
Carroll
Chauncey
Coleman
Cooper
Davis
Dickinson
Darling
Douglas
Dunbar
Edwards
Ellery
Ellis
Emmett
Evans
Farley
Fleming
Forest
French
Gardiner
George
Gerard
Gerry
Gibson
Graham
Hamilton
Haynes
Herbert
Hill
Howard
Hume
Irving
Jackson
James
Jenkins
Johnson
Kane
Kennedy
Ker
Key
King
Langdon
Lawrence
Lee
Leonard
Livingston
Lloyd
McCall
McDonald
Malcalester
Montgomery
Morris
Morton
Nelson
Nicholson
Nixon
Norris
O’Carroll
Ogle
Opie
Parsons
Patterson
Peabody
Pomeroy
Porter
Pratt
Preston
Quay
Randolph
Read
Reeve
Robinson
Rogers
Sanford
Shaw
Smith
Sowden
Stanley
Taylor
Townsend
Turner
Tyler
Valentine
Varson
Walker
Watts
White
Whiting
Williams
Young
But that’s not all.
Another list of names could also indicate whether you have aristocratic relations.
These include:
Windsor
Tudor
Stuart
Plantagenet
Capet
Bourbon
Habsburg
Hanover
Valois
Lancaster
York
Bruce
de Valois
de Medici
Savoy
Orange-Nassau
Oldenburg
Glucksburg
Romanov
Baskerville
Darcy
Neville
Percy
Astley
Capell
Howard
Seymour
Grey
FitzAlan
Courtenay
Manners
Russell
Cavendish
Talbot
Spencer
Of course, these names don’t mean you’re definitely related to the Royal Family, but it’s a good place to start if you’re looking to find out more about your ancestry.