John Ashdown-Hill’s reconstruction of this chain was a substantial piece of historical detective work. He worked forward from Anne of York using a combination of printed genealogical references, archival documents, and the records maintained by genealogical societies and registries in England and Canada. He published his findings in an article in *The Ricardian*, the journal of the Richard III Society, in 2004, identifying Joy Ibsen as the terminal living descendant he had found.
Kevin Schürer’s independent reconstruction of a second line — the one leading to Wendy Duldig — was conducted using similar methods but through a different branch of the genealogical tree descending from Anne of York. The fact that two researchers, working independently and reaching different terminal individuals through different documentary pathways, arrived at results compatible with the skeleton’s DNA was a methodologically important confirmation.
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## The Tower of London and the Unresolved Questions
The princes in the Tower — Edward V, aged twelve in 1483, and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, about nine — are the most famous mystery attached to Richard III’s reign, and the most likely reason that his historical reputation remained more contested than his actual record of governance might otherwise have warranted.
The two boys were last described in contemporary sources as being seen playing in the grounds of the Tower of London in the late summer of 1483. What happened to them afterward is unknown. The German traveler Dominic Mancini, who left England around late 1483, wrote that it was widely rumored they had been murdered and that the English were lamenting their fate. The Italian historian Polydore Vergil, writing under Henry VII, attributed their deaths to Richard. Thomas More provided a dramatic narrative of their murder — two hired assassins, feather pillows, a secret burial beneath a staircase — that most historians now treat as literary reconstruction rather than reliable testimony.