The Genetics of Bill Gates (Updated)

A journey through the historically significant paternal family line of William H. Gates III

(I originally published this article in 2020 and it has remained constantly popular since its release. I have updated the article in places as I move my previous work onto NEWSPASTE.com and Substack, so expect there to be minor additions and grammatical differences between this and the prior version. However, none of the details have been changed from the original version except all Wikipedia sources have been replaced. Enjoy.)

I enjoy researching family histories. I’m always fascinated by how genes express themselves from generation to generation. We often discover that we remain similar creatures to what our ancestors were. Even though we may have become healthier, more savvy, and live in a very different reality from our distant relatives, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn anything from their journey. Researching your family tree will often leave you feeling like you’ve been looking in a mirror. If you go back far enough, you may even come across yourself.

On this occasion, I was motivated by the many people researching Bill Gates, also known as William H. Gates III. Preliminary investigations led me to believe that no one had gone further back than 1806 but this wasn’t the case. In reality, the family history was everywhere but it was fractured and disconnected. It soon became apparent that many researchers had missed some huge connections and that others seemed to be purposely leading people in the wrong direction.

The story of Bill Gates’s genetic journey is full of both necessary misdirection and peculiar happenstance. It is a tale of kings and knights, treason and slaughter, exodus and colonialism, slavery and war, and one massive family.

The Genetic History of Bill Gates

We begin the story of Bill Gates’ ancestry at the turn of the century in 1300 AD. Thomas Gates was born in Essex and is as far back in the Gates family tree as I can trace. Thomas also named his son Thomas, who was born in High Easter, Essex, in 1325, but he barely got to know his heir. Thomas Gates senior died two years after the birth of his son in 1327. It was the same year the newly crowned King Edward III would lose against the Scottish in the Battle of Stanhope, though there is no evidence of what ended the life of Thomas Gates. These were turbulent times in English history, so there are many ways in which a 27-year-old could meet their doom. The 1300s is not the most fruitful time for public records but we can gather that the young Thomas Gates fathered the first recorded William Gates of the Gates family, William F. Gates, born around 1375.

As we enter the 1400’s, we discover that the Gates family is from fine stock. Around 1401, William F. Gates welcomed his son Geoffrey Gates into the world. Eventually, he became Sir Geoffrey Gates and served as a courtier in the second reign of Edward IV. Things were getting better for the Gates dynasty before it was about to get unimaginably worse. Sir Geoffrey Gates’s son, another William Gates, only lived until 35, born about 1450 and dying on 16 October 1485, just a few years after the birth of his son, who was also eventually titled Sir Geoffrey Gates.

Off With Their Heads!

Sir Geoffrey Gates I was born about 1481 and married Elizabeth Clopton in Kentwell in 1500. This era is very well documented compared to the previous two centuries. Sir Geoffrey Gates I had 8 children, most notably Sir John Gates MP, Sir Henry Gates MP, and Sir Geoffrey Gates II. We’ll be following the line of Sir Geoffrey Gates II to meet up with the billionaire creator of Microsoft but, to understand why he and his brother were eventually executed, we should look at the more well-documented story of his brother Sir John Gates.

As the funeral procession, carrying the body of Henry VIII, moved through his kingdom and to its final resting place, Sir John Gates proudly rode on horseback beside the corpse of his beloved king. This was a sombre day for the loyal courtier of the recently deceased monarch, after all, even though he had made his fortune thanks to some shrewd dealings, his affluence was mainly due to the chubby ruler. When King Henry ordered the dissolution of the monasteries, Sir John Gates managed to take control of many former church buildings all across Essex including the famous Beeleigh Abbey.

In January 1547, came the 6-year reign of Henry VIII’s only son who was crowned King Edward VI. Edward VI was only 9 years old when he took the throne, so his courtiers were extremely influential. Sir John Gates and his brothers, Sir Henry Gates and Sir Geoffrey Gates II, had the young king’s ear; they were three of the most powerful men in the realm. During the 6-year reign of Edward VI, a succession crisis wasn’t expected to materialise any time soon. However, when the young king became sick at 15, these men came to the sudden realisation that his Catholic sister Mary Tudor was next in line to the throne. A plot was soon devised by the king himself and his closest advisors to place his cousin, Lady Jane Grey, on the throne at his death. However, when he did die, the plot fell apart and Mary Tudor was soon made Queen of England.

In 1530, over two decades before the reign of Mary, Geoffrey Gates III had been born and he is recorded as marrying Joan Wentworth, who was the granddaughter of Sir Henry Wentworth. Joan and Geoffrey married in 1550 and Peter Gates was born shortly after. Then came the reign of Bloody Queen Mary and the Gates family were some of the first to suffer the consequences.

Mary became infamous for her savage executions and one of her first set of victims were those who had taken part in the plot to keep her from the throne. Sir John Gates, Sir Geoffrey Gates II and his wife Deol Gates (née Pascall) were executed on 22 August 1553 in front of a small crowd. Over the following centuries, people claimed that the headless ghost of Sir John Gates could be seen roaming Beeleigh Abbey on the anniversary of his death.

“Sir John,” sayeth the duke, “God have mercy upon us, for this day shall end both our lives. And I pray you forgive me whatsoever I have offended; and I forgive you with all my heart, although you and your counsel was a great occasion hereof.” “Well, my lord,” sayeth Sir John Gates, “I forgive you as I would be forgiven; and yet you and your authority was the only original cause of all together; but the Lord pardon you, and I pray you forgive me.” So, either making obeisance to [each] other, the duke proceeded [towards the scaffold].

Sir Geoffrey Gates II and his wife Deol had at least 4 sons who were swiftly hidden and had been named John Gates, Geoffrey Gates III, Henry Gates, and Anthony Gates. As you can imagine, the Gates family members, who were located mainly across Essex, were shaken to the core by the gruesome public death of their most high-ranking members. The records suggest that some of the family members went straight into hiding at this point and it’s here where things become a little more sketchy.

Many researchers who have been following these ancestral trees seem to make a simple error: They don’t view the evidence in context to the events of the time making anomalies harder to recognise.

Mary I had been left vast estates in East Anglia by her father which were confiscated from the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, by Henry VIII. She spent the years leading up to her rule living close to Maldon on the Essex coast. Her location put her just a few miles away from Beeleigh Abbey, one of the many church properties gained by Sir John Gates from Henry VIII’s separation from Rome and the Catholic church. These wealthy knights of the realm were part of the court that had denounced Mary Tudor’s right of succession and almost destroyed Catholicism in England.

Peter Gates, born around January 1548, was the penultimate generation of Gates to be born in High Easter in Essex, home to generations of the Gates family beforehand. Their new base became Coney Weston in Suffolk about 40 miles north of their original homestead. There is evidence to suggest that they changed their name for a short period after the massacre of 1553. One of Peter Gates’ sons, from the final generation of the Gates family to reside in High Easter, was Eustace Gates who was born in about 1569. Eustace didn’t go by the name Gates for all of his life, he would also call himself Eustace Jaques and Eustace Jayuettes, the latter is even written on his gravestone, and Eustace also referred to his sons with the same surname in public documentation such as his last will and testament from 15 Mar 1626:

“Eustace Jaques of Cony Weston….laborer” named “Rose Jaques my wife…Rose Jaques , Ales Jaques, Marie Jaques the elder, and Marie Jaques the younger my fowre daughters……..William Jaques, Thomas Jaques, Stephen Jaques and Symond Jaques my fowre sonnes….my brother in lawe William Wright of Greate Ellingam in the countie of Norff yeoman.”

All of his children soon returned to using the Gates name but there were still obviously the troubling psychological scars of the recent political and religious persecution. Mary I was only on the throne from 1553 until 1558, when Elizabeth I began her reign, but by that time the protestant Gates family no longer felt safe in England. They moved as far away as possible very soon.

Migration to America

One of Eustace’s sons, Stephen Gates I, who was born in Coney Weston just before 26 December 1597, took his family on an epic adventure to the New World. He was part of the “Great Puritan Migration” that began to colonise foreign lands on behalf of Queen Elizabeth I. He migrated on a ship called the Diligent in 1638 and arrive in Boston on 10 August of that same year. The Colony of Massachusetts had only been founded in 1628, so the early colonists were entering a rough and rugged way of life fraught with new dangers. But it was written that there had been more than just a couple of problems back home in Britain.

The Gates blood was of a tropical nature; daughter Mary boldly contradicted the Minister in public; Stephen quarreled with neighbors, the Whitcombs, was deprived of Constable’ss Staff and left Lancaster; sons tried unsuccessfully to break his will.

At first, the Gates family settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Stephen Gates I eventually died on 29 Sep 1662. Stephen and his wife Anne Neave, who was also from Coney Weston, had seven children together; two of them, Rebecca and Issac, died in England before they reached 6 years of age. The others were Mary Adele, Elizabeth, Stephen, Thomas, and Simon. We’re going to follow the line of Thomas Gates, who was born sometime before 3 May 1646. Thomas was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and eventually married Elizabeth Susan Freeman in her home town of Sudbury, Massachusetts, on 6 July 1670.

Elizabeth and Thomas kept to the Gates tradition of enormous family units. They had eleven children between 1671 and 1693, seven girls and four boys. One of those boys was called Caleb Gates who was born about 1693. Caleb Gates married Mary Forbes on 06 Jun 1716 and they eventually moved to another of the thirteen British colonies, Connecticut. They also had a large family, ten children were registered to Caleb and Mary Gates in Preston City, New London. In this case, the children were: Thomas, Joshua, Jesse, Sarah, Jonathan, Eunice, Nathan, Mary, Caleb, while the youngest was Simon Gates.

The young Simon Gates, was born on 15 September 1724, eventually became Ensign Simon Gates and married two women during his lifetime. One of his wives was named Olive but her family name and fate are unclear, however, Ensign Simon Gates’s marriage to Prudence Billings, who was born about 1731, proved to be much more fruitful. Prudence and Simon recorded having 6 children and all their names hinted at a strongly religious family unit. Their children were Mary, Asa, Caleb, Israel, Elijah, and Ephraim.

The family also moved to West Greenwich, Kent County, in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Rhode Island had evolved into a colony that held on strongly to the belief in freedom to practice one’s religion and this became a popular destination for various religious minorities. Ensign Simon Gates died in 1774, aged around 50 years. He had answered the call to revolt against British rule, as did his brothers Caleb Gates and Asa Gates.

Hiding Links to Israel

​As we approach the more modern Gates family history, we should ask the obvious questions. Why do the vast majority of the sources currently claim that Bill Gates’s ancestry is only traceable as far as Joseph Stanton Gates in 1806? Joseph Stanton Gates’ father is fully traceable, so why would professionals ignore Joseph’s links to Israel?

Israel Gates was supposedly born in 1764 in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. He had three children with his wife Ruth Eunice Gates and that is a relatively small family for the Gates genetics. Their first child they named Asa Gates, the second they named Thomas Jefferson Gates, and their final child was Joseph Stanton Gates.​

The first piece of awkward information you can learn about this section of the family is that Ruth Eunice Gates doesn’t have a different maiden name. In fact, Ruth and Israel are related to each other and she already comes from the same family line as Israel. Her great-grandfather was Stephen Gates II, son of the original Stephen Gates I who migrated to the first of the thirteen colonies over a century before. This sort of incest was completely normalised in those days, so officially there’s nothing to see here and a little bit of light historical incest shouldn’t put a researcher off discovering the lineage of one of the richest and most powerful men on planet Earth. So what was Israel Gates doing in the 18th and 19th centuries that could cause people to whitewash him from history?

In Israel’s time, Newport was a major centre of the slave trade in early America. Slave-produced sugar and molasses from the Caribbean were shipped to Rhode Island and were then distilled into rum, which was then sent back to West Africa to be exchanged for more captured African slaves. In 1764, when Israel Gates was born, Rhode Island had about 30 rum distilleries, 22 in Newport alone.

Around 60% of slave-trading voyages launched from North America were issued from Rhode Island, in some years more than 90%, and many from Newport. Almost half the men, women and children were trafficked illegally, often breaking the 1787 state law prohibiting residents of the state from trading in slaves. Rhode Island was one of the main hubs of the global slave trade, and in Israel’s lifetime, this became an illegal activity.

Joseph Stanton Gates was also referred to as Joseph L Gates and was born in around 1806. He would marry Martha P. Satterlee on 5 January 1863 in Delmar, Tioga, Pennsylvania. Martha Satterlee, born 10 May 1823, would have been 40 years old when she married. But according to the birth certificate of their only child, William H. Gates, the couple had William on 22 January 1860, three years before they tied the knot. This is probably due to the country being on the cusp of the American Civil War which began in 1861.

Joseph Stanton Gates did not stay living near the East Coast of America and was the first Gates to move to Seattle in Washington state. He went on to father Florence Martha Gates, William Henry Gates, Sr. and Pearl Ann Gates. William Henry Gates, Sr., also called his son William H Gates, and is the grandfather of Bill Gates.

The Gates Family Went Viral

I’m not going to explain to you the life and times of Bill Gates’s immediate family, I will leave you to do your own research if you wish to know more. Instead, I wanted to discover what led us to this man who we call Bill Gates?

Bill Gates talks about the dangers of overpopulation but it’s clear that the Gates genetics spread in a similar manner to a virus. One generation of the Gates family often had up to eleven children per household. When I followed other branches of their family tree, I discovered equally powerful and wealthy members of the extended family. Bill Gates is also related to George W Bush and George H W Bush on their mother’s side and also to Harry Truman among many other famous powerful people. The Gates family is a very wealthy family connected to many other wealthy and powerful families.

During my research, I came across tonnes of errors, misinformation and missing links. Many of the dates had to be rechecked and verified over and over before the true picture emerged. The execution of Sir John Gates on 22 August 1553 is well known, but the fact that Sir Geoffrey Gates and his wife Deol Gates were executed on the same day has never been alluded to. This was partly because people had made an error with Deol Gates’ year of death.

If the most powerful people in your family were to be beheaded by a reigning monarch, then it’s quite normal to expect other members of the family to go into hiding. Previous researchers didn’t seem to realise that the anomalies in tracing that part of the Gates family history were due to the repercussions of the reign of Bloody Queen Mary.

During such tumultuous times, some protestant families held off on baptisms, weddings, and other protestant religious ceremonies. Many researchers seem to assume that the date of baptism is the same as the date of birth, but this simplistic calculation can mean that dates become muddled and you may end up discounting, or simply overlooking, crucial information.

The Gates family always always seemed to be in a position of power. Their lineage contains so many “Knights of the Realm” that I had to eventually stop counting. Their family history is one of affluence, privilege and grasping of great opportunities. When the East Anglian family fled England, so did almost 50% of their county and many other English families soon followed. This sudden migration caused reverberations throughout England which came to a crescendo with the English Civil War. The Gates family jumped out of the frying pan and by heading to America, jumped into the fire. I wasn’t able to find out whether or not the Gates family were part of the slave trade when they moved to Newport, Rhode Island. However, they clearly moved there during the peak of the American slave trade.

The wealthy and powerful families of this relatively recently founded country that calls itself the USA are often connected by their bloodlines and their hunger for power persists over many generations. If history tends to repeat itself, then maybe Bill Gates could one day find his head resting on the chopping block.