Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, was born on 4 August 1981 in Los Angeles and is 42 years old. She is a former actor and married Prince Harry on 19 May 2018, after which they received the titles of Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The couple announced that they were stepping down as working members of the royal family in January 2020 and now live in California. They have two children: Prince Archie of Sussex (born in 2019) and Princess Lilibet of Sussex (born in 2021).
The couple have just completed a three-day tour of Nigeria. During the visit, Meghan said that Nigeria is “[her] country”, saying she discovered after taking a DNA test two years ago that she is 43% Nigerian.
Meghan Markle’s mother Doria Ragland, born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1959, is of African-American descent. Her first identifiable African-American ancestor is her 4x great grandfather Richard Ragland, who was born into slavery in Chatham County, South Carolina in around 1792. His son Stephen Ragland (c.1848-1926), Doria’s 3x great grandfather, lived through the abolition of slavery in America in 1865 and died in Paulding County, Georgia. The Ragland surname appears to come from William Ragland, a Methodist slave plantation owner from Britain who lived in Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia.
Doria Ragland married Meghan Markle’s father Thomas Markle in 1979 and they divorced in 1987. Thomas Markle was born in 1944 in Newport, Pennsylvania and is of German, Dutch, English and Irish descent. The surname Markle appears to be an anglicised version of the German surname Merckel. Meghan Markle also has royal ancestry as, like a variety of celebrities including Danny Dyer, she is very distantly descended from King Edward III.