Michael Ibsen’s mother, Joy Ibsen, was a Canadian woman born in 1932. She had cooperated with John Ashdown-Hill’s genealogical research, provided a DNA sample, and died in 2008, before the Leicester excavation began. Her mitochondrial haplogroup — J — had been identified from that sample, and the specific sequence had been used to establish what a match with Richard III would need to look like.
Joy Ibsen’s maternal line traced back through several generations of Canadian families and before that to families in England. The line ran backward through daughters to mothers to grandmothers through the seventeenth, sixteenth, and fifteenth centuries, eventually reaching Anne of York, Richard III’s sister, who had been born in 1439 and died in 1476.
Anne of York had herself died young — at 36 or 37, after bearing at least one child. The line from Anne required not just her survival to adulthood but the survival of her daughter to adulthood and the continuation of the line through that daughter and all subsequent generations. If any one of the 19 women in the chain had died without daughters, or if any of those daughters had died before having children of their own, the mitochondrial connection would have ended and no living comparator would have existed in 2012.
The genealogical work of tracing this chain was itself substantial. Historical records for ordinary women in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries are often sparse or absent. Parish registers begin systematically in England only in 1538 — exactly the year the Greyfriars Friary was dissolved — and earlier records depend on family archives, legal documents, and occasional mentions in other sources. Ashdown-Hill’s reconstruction of the chain required sourcing records across multiple countries and centuries, and there were points where the evidence was thin enough to require careful assessment of whether a proposed link was sufficiently documented.