Rob's real-life vampire connection
Royalty and vampires may sound like characters from the Twilight Saga – but they're actually what you find once you bite into Robert Pattinson's past. Ancestry.com, the world's largest online family history resource, says Pattinson – America's favorite vampire who stars as Edward Cullen in the hit Twilight Saga movie series – is related to Vlad III Dracula, the basis for the famous literary villain. The company says Pattinson and Vlad are likely related through the British royal family.
Born in Transylvania, Vlad, also known as Vlad the Impaler, was a three-time ruler of Wallachia (now a region of Romania) who ruled primarily from 1456 to 1462. Vlad's nickname "the Impaler" stems from his cruel and inhumane punishments of enemies. He is commonly thought to be the inspiration for Count Dracula in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula.
"Tracing Pattinson's family back to Vlad was difficult research, but the pieces that unraveled created the perfect accompaniment to the Twilight Saga," said Anastasia Tyler, a genealogist at Ancestry.com. "Without any myth or magic, we find royalty and vampires lurking in Pattinson's life – making his story just as supernatural as the one he's playing on screen."
Family history experts at Ancestry.com discovered that Pattinson's and Dracula's family trees connect through none other than the British royal line: Pattinson is distant cousins with Prince William and Prince Harry on their father's side, likely through the Pickering family who lived in Yorkshire, England, in the early 1500s. Vlad the Impaler is a distant uncle of Prince William and Prince Harry.
But Pattinson isn't the only Twilight personality with real-life vampire connections. Ancestry.com found that Twilight Saga author Stephenie Meyer is also a distant cousin to the British princes – linking Meyer to famed Dracula as well. Ancestry.com previously revealed other "blood curdling" connections to Dracula through the royals including former president George W. Bush and U.S. Senator John Kerry.
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