The new book American Crown argues that Prince William American roots extend to Revolutionary-era figures, author Stephanie Green told Fox News Digital; Green builds the claim from family trees, local memorials and secondary compilations. Green’s reporting and subsequent coverage by Fox News Digital and The Washington Post have focused public attention on the possible transatlantic links between the future king and early American patriots.
Kensington Palace has declined to comment on books about royal ancestry; readers should note many of Green’s links depend on interpretation of genealogical records and secondary sources and will need independent archival confirmation.
What the book claims about Prince William American roots
Green’s book traces William’s maternal and collateral lines to colonial New England families and to later American social figures.
American Crown, by Stephanie Green, argues that William’s ancestry includes a Coventry, Connecticut line connected to Benajah Strong and a putative link onward to Nathan Hale. Green told Fox News Digital: “I traced William’s lineage to Nathan Hale and other colonial figures, based on family records and local histories.” That quote reflects Green’s framing in media interviews; the underlying genealogical links cited in the book come from a mixture of civil records, cemetery inscriptions, published family trees and local histories.
Key American ancestors named
The book highlights several named U.S. figures and social-era ancestors tied into William’s broader pedigree.
Nathan Hale: Green frames Hale — a Yale-educated Continental Army scout captured and executed by the British in 1776 — as a symbolic Revolutionary-era connection in the extended family narrative; Hale’s biography and execution are well documented in secondary histories.
Benajah Strong: Green identifies a sixth-great-grandfather from Coventry, Connecticut, and points to local memorials and militia service records as supporting evidence that link the Strong family to the branch she traces into William’s tree.
Frances “Fannie” Work (Frances Burke Roche): The book highlights Fannie Work as an American heiress of the Gilded Age whose social position and marriage into British aristocracy are used to illustrate transatlantic ties; some details are drawn from compiled genealogies such as AmericanAristocracy.com and vary across sources.
Where Green cites local graves, published family trees and secondary compilations, she constructs a narrative that connects named individuals across generations; the strength of each connection depends on the original records cited and how they are linked across branches.
How reliable are the links?
Some claimed connections rest on contemporary primary records; others rely on single secondary sources or genealogical compilations and remain unverified.
Green’s work assembles many public records and local histories, and The Washington Post confirms some supporting details such as a Coventry-born ancestor with Connecticut militia service. At the same time, other claims in American Crown depend heavily on Green’s interpretation of compiled genealogies and sites like AmericanAristocracy.com, which do not always publish primary-source documentation.
Well-documented: Nathan Hale’s life and execution are established by multiple historical sources; some militia service records and burial memorials cited for Coventry-era relatives are corroborated in local records reported in secondary coverage. Speculative or unverified: direct descent lines that bridge multiple generations based only on compiled family trees or single online transcriptions lack the contemporaneous primary documents historians prefer — wills, original muster rolls, parish registers or deeds — and therefore require independent archival confirmation.
In short: parts of the book cite primary-material anchors or widely accepted historical facts; other parts are plausible reconstructions that should be treated as provisional until primary documents are reviewed by independent researchers.
Why Prince William American roots matter now
The claim reframes public interest in the royal family by linking modern royals to U.S. revolutionary history and to figures associated with Princess Diana and the Spencer family.
The narrative resonates because it connects contemporary interest in William and his family with broader Anglo-American history — invoking Princess Diana, the Spencer archives and sites such as Althorp — and because the irony of Revolutionary-era forebears within the lineage of a future British monarch captures public imagination. That cultural appeal helps explain media traction even as genealogical specifics remain under scrutiny.
Source attribution
This explainer is based on Stephanie Green’s American Crown as described in Fox News Digital’s reporting and supplemented by historical context reported in The Washington Post.
Fox News Digital reporting on Green’s claims is the primary contemporary source for the book’s assertions; The Washington Post provides additional background and context about transatlantic family links. Kensington Palace has told Fox News Digital it does not comment on books about royal ancestry.
Readers should treat some genealogical links in Green’s book as documented where they rest on contemporaneous primary records or widely accepted historical facts, and as speculative where they depend only on secondary compilations or interpreted family trees; independent archival verification is the standard next step for confirming lineage claims.
Original reporting: Fox News Digital — Prince William’s surprising American roots. Additional background: The Washington Post.
