Meghan gave a different account of that important landmark in her family history when she spoke to Elle magazine in 2015 – before she met Prince Harry: ‘Perhaps the closest thing connecting me to my ever-complex family tree, my longing to know where I came from, and the commonality that links me to my bloodline, is the choice that my great-great-great-grandfather made to start anew. He chose the last name Wisdom.’ He may well have done so informally but genealogists poring over Meghan’s ancestry have failed to find a thread linking the last name Wisdom to her family tree. Often family histories become confused by the telling and the retelling.
The Ragland family’s life changed forever when they made the 2,300-mile trek from Cleveland to Los Angeles soon after Doria was born in September 1956. There were five of them in a borrowed car: Alvin, Jeanette, her two children from her first marriage – Joseph Jr and Saundra – and baby Doria. While it wasn’t exactly an epic story matching the trip west of the Joad family in Steinbeck’s magnificent novel of the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath, the trip did become the subject of countless stories told to Meghan as a little girl.
Uncle Joseph, who was some seven years older than Doria, was chief storyteller. One of the most vivid of his tales was when they pulled into yet another small redneck town in the middle of nowhere. There was a blizzard of biblical proportions and, rather aptly, they were searching for a room for the night. They had no luck, sent packing back to the highway by the locals who would not welcome any blacks on their white-only streets or, heaven forbid, in their white-only beds.
And then there were the countless times when they stopped for food at a diner and had to use the back door for ‘coloureds’. This was practically a daily occurrence as they shuffled in, trying not to draw attention to themselves.
Eventually they made it to Los Angeles, which, while not exactly the Promised Land, gave everyone a chance of a better life. Jeanette found work as a nurse, while Alvin, who had a strong entrepreneurial streak, started off working for his Aunt Lillie before finding his niche buying and selling bric-a-brac and curios in flea markets. Eventually, he opened his own antique shop called Twas New. By all accounts, he loved the objects for sale more than the money he might make from them. His pride and joy was his collection of vintage American cars.
Alvin was also a charismatic man whose company women enjoyed. His marriage to Jeanette did not last long in the California sunshine. They divorced and she became a single mum to the three children while he moved in with Lillie in the prosperous LA neighbourhood of View Park–Windsor Hills. The family remained close, however.
Meghan’s maternal line is full of strong women, and Doria was no exception. She grew up with a committed sense of social justice, perhaps an understandable reaction to the hardships her family had faced down the generations. She went to Fairfax High School in Hollywood, which during her teenage years was still a hotbed of racial tension.
At that age, Doria, known as Dodi at school, was a member of the Apex Club, a class for exceptionally smart pupils. She was a purposeful teenager, a trait she would pass on to her daughter. She was also part of a group of black students who would protest rigorously about the continued injustice and inequality faced by their communities. One of her friends from those days, Jennifer Caldwell, recalled, ‘She was a beautiful girl both inside and out. She had this beautiful afro hairstyle she was very proud of and she was always into fashion. She was whip smart, always smiling and sociable.’
Her parents may not have made a fortune but they were certainly comfortable. Doria lived a typical teenage life. She was the designated class driver when she passed her test and could borrow her mum’s car. They would all head off, with Marvin Gaye songs blaring out, to their favourite hangout place, called Tico’s, where they joined the queue for one of the restaurant’s famous tacos.
Doria was a free spirit and didn’t rush to engage in a career after school, preferring a relaxed, bohemian lifestyle in northern California for a while before she returned to LA. She found work as a temporary secretary, then as a trainee makeup artist at the Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood, where they filmed the long-running soap General Hospital.
There she met a lighting director called Thomas Markle.
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Doria couldn’t miss Tom Markle. He was six foot three, well-built with a shock of red hair. She, on the other hand, was slim and striking. Meghan would later comment, ‘I like to think he was drawn to her sweet eyes and her afro, plus their shared love of antiques.’
He had also come from a relentlessly white background in his home state of Pennsylvania. Meghan described it as a ‘homogenised’ community where the ‘concept of marrying an African–American woman was not on the cards’.
Coincidentally, his ancestors had also made a dramatic move in search of a better life. In their case, they left their mining community in Yorkshire during the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1869, in pursuit of the American Dream. His great-grandmother, Mattie Sykes, was just a baby when they crossed the Atlantic.
News that Meghan may have had British connections caused a flurry of interest in her family tree when she was first linked to Prince Harry. It was even worked out that the couple were themselves seventeenth cousins, due to a tenuous link she had with King Edward III, who ruled England for fifty years from 1327 to 1377.
When she joined Harry on an official visit to Dublin in July 2018, it was established that she had an Irish connection as well. Highlighting the family tree of an important visitor to Ireland has become a common practice. Meghan was presented with documents showing she was descended from a Belfast girl.
The American connection began in the mining community of Mahanoy City, which despite its grand name has a population of less than 4,000. It’s a bit in the middle of nowhere, some eighty miles from Philadelphia, and not exactly a step up from the north of England in Victorian times. It was a harsh environment and Mattie’s father, Thomas Sykes, died from heart failure at the age of 43, leaving his widow to raise five children.
Meghan’s ancestors hadn’t moved far by the time Tom Markle was born, in July 1944, as World War II was drawing to a close. He grew up in the borough of Newport, Pennsylvania, seventy miles away from Mahanoy City, where his father Gordon worked for a time at an air force base in nearby Harrisburg before winding up in admin at the local post office. Tom’s mother Doris worked at the J. J. Newberry’s five and dime store in Newport. She would eventually be acknowledged as the matriarch of the family and someone loved and respected by Meghan.
The royal author Andrew Morton, who wrote the groundbreaking Diana: Her True Story, described Tom’s childhood as being like something out of Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The family, including his two older brothers, lived in a modest white clapboard house on Sixth Street that was conveniently near woods and a river where the three boys would fish for catfish. Doris was a superb cook, filling her sons with homemade pies and making jam from the blackberries they picked in summer.
Such an idyllic-sounding youth was not enough to persuade any of the brothers that they wanted to stay in Newport, however. They all moved away. Meghan painted a less sentimental view of her dad’s roots, who, she said, ‘came from so little in a small town in Pennsylvania, where Christmas stockings were filled with oranges and dinners were potatoes and Spam.’
The eldest of the three brothers, Mick, joined the United States Air Force and worked for many years in communications for the government, prompting speculation that he in fact had a job with the CIA. Understandably, he’s never confirmed