Joy Ibsen’s son, Michael Ibsen, was a furniture maker living in London. He was a living male-line maternal descendant of Richard III — meaning he had inherited his mother’s mitochondrial DNA, which was available to compare against the ancient sample.
A second living female-line descendant of Anne of York was subsequently identified through separate genealogical research conducted by Kevin Schürer, a University of Leicester historian specializing in historical demography. This second individual, Wendy Duldig, was a more distant relative — separated from Richard III’s mitochondrial ancestor by 21 generations rather than Michael Ibsen’s 19.
The identification of two independent living comparators was methodologically important. A single match could more plausibly be attributed to coincidence or to a common ancestry that did not trace directly through the documented lineage. Two independent matches, through two separate genealogical paths, significantly strengthened the evidential basis.
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## The Mitochondrial Match
Michael Ibsen provided a DNA sample in August 2012, shortly after the skeleton was discovered. The sample was taken as a buccal swab. Laboratory analysis at the University of Leicester sequenced his complete mitochondrial genome.
The ancient DNA extracted from the skeleton was compared against this sequence. The comparison showed a complete mitochondrial genome match: every position in Michael Ibsen’s mitochondrial DNA was identical to the corresponding position in the ancient DNA from the skeleton.
The comparison with Wendy Duldig’s mitochondrial DNA showed a near-complete match, differing by a single base — a single-letter variation in one position of the mitochondrial genome. The researchers described this as expected and compatible with the genealogy. Mitochondrial DNA is extremely stable but is not entirely static; mutations accumulate very slowly across generations, and a single-base difference over 21 generations of descent is consistent with the known rate of mitochondrial mutation. It does not indicate that the line is broken or that Duldig is less reliably connected to the same maternal ancestor; it indicates that one mutation has occurred somewhere in the 21 generations between the common ancestor and Duldig.