All people are descended via various racial or ethnic lines of the antiquity, but in case of most, records do not exist. The British Royal Family is one of the few families, for whom ancestry can be traced to many notable lineages of the antiquity. They can be traced from Saxon, Scottish (Stuart dynasty), Welsh (Tudor dynasty), Irish, German (Hanover and Windsor), French (Norman and Plantagenet Angevin dynasties), Russian, Frank and perhaps even Byzantine lineages.
Saxon and Scottish descent
The earliest Saxon-cum-Scottish connections were through Matilda of Scotland, whose father was a Scottish king and mother, a Saxon princess. (However, the earliest Saxon connection was through her mother-in-law, Matilda of Flanders, who had descended from Ælfthryth of Wessex, daughter of the Saxon king Alfred the Great.) The general descent through this connection, of the current British royal family, is shown below. Various special descents of members shown in this chart are discussed later.