JK Rowling Family History

Joanne or Jo Rowling, better known as the writer JK Rowling, was born on July 31st, 1965 to Pete and Anne Rowling in Yate, Gloucestershire.

Pete and Anne had met up the previous year while sharing a rail trip from Kings Cross, London to naval postings in Scotland.  Anne was going there to join the Wrens and Pete the Royal Navy.  However, they ended up in Gloucestershire when Jo was conceived.

Her mother Anne had a strong influence on Jo’s upbringing.  Early on, Anne’s support gave Jo confidence and enthusiasm to write stories.  But when Jo was fifteen Anne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.  Jo’s home life became distressed by her mother’s illness and by her increasingly strained relationship with her father.

Things would get worse, much worse, before they got better:

• In 1990 she lost her mother when she died of multiple sclerosis.  And she was furious with her father who remarried soon afterwards.  She broke off contact with him.
• In 1992 she left for Portugal where she met and married the Portuguese journalist Jorge Arantes.  They had a daughter Jessica the following year.  But the marriage soon disintegrated after Jorge became violent.  Jo fled Portugal with her baby daughter for Edinburgh where her sister Di was living.

Jo sought to rebuild her life in Scotland.  She said of her early time there:

“For the next four years I did the job of two parents, qualified and then worked as a secondary school teacher, wrote one and a half novels and did the planning for a further five.

For a while I was clinically depressed.  To be told over and over again that I was feckless, lazy – even immoral – did not help.”

The Harry Potter Books.  Jo had the first idea of Harry Potter in 1990.  She would work on drafts of the book in coffee shops during her early time in Edinburgh.  And the first of her Harry Potter books – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – was completed in 1995.

After being rejected by twelve publishers that year, the book finally came out in printed form in 1997.  By the following year it had become a bestseller in Britain and America.  Jo was being described as “the penniless divorcee who hit the jackpot.”

Six Harry Potter books followed this initial success, the last of them being Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows in 1997.

The first Harry Potter film appeared in 2001.  Five more Harry Potter films, based on the books, followed in the next ten years.  By this time the Harry Potter films, books and author JK Rowling had all become world-famous.

Post Harry Potter.  Jo has written other fiction – both for children and adults – after the Harry Potter series.  And she has been actively engaged on the internet, first appearing there before author webpages had become commonplace.

Her Single Mother’s Manifesto was published by The Times in 2010.  Sometimes her views have been controversial, such as her views against transgenders that started appearing in 2019.

Jo’s Rowling Line

Rowling is not a common English surname.  Its meaning is unclear.  There were fewer than 600 Rowlings in the 1881 census.  Some 45% of that number were to be found on the east coast of England – half of them being in Yorkshire and half in East Anglia (Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire).

Jo’s own Rowlings were first recorded as farm laborers at Bassingbourn in Cambridgeshire.  Ernest Rowling was born there in 1827.  He had married and moved to London by the 1850’s.  Later Rowlings of his family made their home in London:

• William Rowling (b. 1854)
• Frank Rowling (1882-1962)
• and Ernest Rowling (1916-1980)

William Rowling, born in London, was a blacksmith and was recorded in Walthamstow as having fifteen children with his wife Francis.

His grandson Ernest was Jo’s paternal grendfather.  Two of Ernest’s older brothers were RAF pilots who died when their planes were shot down during World War Two.  Later, when Jo adopted the nom de plume of JK Rowling, she had no middle name and took the ‘K’ from Ernest’s wife Kathleen.

Ernest and Kathleen had two sons born during World War Two, Jeffrey and Peter (Jo’s father).  They both worked as engineer apprentices with Rolls Royce in Bristol for a while.  Later Jeffrey and his family left the area for Florida.

But Jo, it must be said, has related much more to her mother’s side of the family.  It is noteworthy that when she undertook BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? in 2011, she chose to focus solely on her mother’s ancestry.

She was closer to her mother than to her father when they were both alive.  And when her mother died of multiple sclerosis at forty-five in 1990, she was furious that her father would remarry his secretary just two years later.  She broke off contact with him.  And Pete did not attend either of his daughter’s weddings at that time.

Her Maternal Line

It is the women in Jo’s maternal line that have mostly demanded our attention:

• Salome Schuch Volant ( 1854-1926) from Alsace who came to Paris
• Eliza Smith Volant (1874-1964) from Suffolk who came to London
• and Louisa Watts Volant (1916-1997) from a Scottish father in London

The traumas of these three women when young were to set the narrative for this side of the family.

Salome Schuch.  The first of these women, Salome Schuch, was born in the French province of Alsace in 1854.  When she was sixteen the Franco-Prussian War erupted.  France lost and Alsace was taken away from them.

The Schuchs then had to decide whether to stay and become German or leave and stay French.  They split.  Most stayed.  But Salome’s aunt Catherine, followed by Salome herself, decided to leave and take their chances in Paris.

Salome became a domestic servant in Paris.  In 1877 she got pregnant and gave birth (no father being reported).  Fortunately a white knight emerged a year later in the form of Pierre Volant, a tailor from Gironde who had moved to Paris.  They married.  He accepted her baby Louis and they went on to have four more children.  She gave up being a domestic and worked as a seamstress.

Her baby Louis, who adopted the Volant surname, would grow up and in his twenties move to London to find work.

Eliza (Lizzie) Smith.  Eliza Smith, born in 1874 in the village of Kessingland in Suffolk near the Norfolk border, also moved to the capital, in this case London, to find work as a nursery maid at a place near Marble Arch.

She also met a gallant Frenchman – Louis Volant – who was working as a wine waiter at London’s Savoy Hotel.  They married in 1900 and made their home in Marylebone, London.  Four children were born over the next ten years, including Jo’s grandfather Stanley Volant.

The Great War broke out and Louis left London to fight for France on the Western Front.  There he distinguished himself in battle and served as an army interpretor.  After the war he did return to family and the Savoy Hotel where he worked until 1927.  He later moved back to France.  He died in 1949 at Maisons-Lafitte, an outer suburb of Paris, sadly today in a communal grave.

Lizzie did not want to move to France, although she did remain in contact with her husband there, and she lived on in London.  She died in Wandsworth, London in 1964 at the age of eighty-nine.

Louisa (Freda) Watts.  Louisa Watts Smith was thought to have been the illegitimate daughter of Dr. Dugald Campbell.  Born on the Isle of Arran in Scotland, he had worked for a while in Hawaii before setting up a doctor’s practice in Brixton in south London in 1899.  There he was said to have had an affair with a young bookkeeper named Mary Smith.

Mary Smith apparently disappeared after giving birth to her daughter.  The girl was then raised by the Watts family who owned the nursing home in Islington, London where she was born.  She was called Freda by them and only told that her father went by the name of Doctor Campbell.

In 1938 Freda married Stanley Volant in Islington.  He was then working as a laborer at a lathe and milling plant in London.  She was twenty-two at the time.  Their two children, Marian and Anne (Jo’s mother), were born during the war.  She outlived her husband, just like the two Volant women before her.

JK Rowling’s Family Tree

• Stanley Volant m. Louisa (Freda) Watts (1916-1997) in Islington, London in 1938.  Freda is thought to have been the illegitimate daughter of Mary Smith with the Scottish doctor Dugald Campbell (1858-1940).
• – Marian Volant (b. 1940’s) m. Leslie Fox
• – Anne Volant (1945-1990), born in Luton

• Anne Volant m. Peter (Pete) Rowling (b. 1945) in Islington, London in 1965.  They made their home in Gloucestershire.  After Anne’s death Pete rem. his secretary Janet Gallivan (b. 1953) in Newport in 1992
• – Joanne (Jo) Rowling (b. 1965)
• – Dianne (Di) Rowling (b. 1967) m. Roger Moore in Edinburgh in 1993

• Jo (JK) Rowling m. Jorge Arantes in Portugal in 1992, separated in 1993 and moved to Edinburgh in 1994; rem. Dr. Neil Murray in Mauritius in 2001
• – Jessica Rowling Arantes (b. 1993 in Portugal)
• – David Rowling Murray (b. 2003 in Scotland)
• – Mackenzie Rowling Murray (b. 2005 in Scotland)

• Paternal Line

• Frank Rowling from London (1882-1962) m. Louisa Holland (1883-1931) in Walthamstow, London in 1902
• – James Rowling (1911-1942), RAF pilot shot down in World War Two
• – George Rowling (1913-1940), RAF pilot shot down in World War Two
• – Peggy Rowling (b. 1915) m. Leslie Marsh
• – Ernest Rowling (1916-1980)
• – Alfred Rowling (1918-1947)
• – Ronald Rowling (1921-1985)

• Ernest Rowling from Walthamstow, London m. Kathleen Bulgen (1923-1972) in Enfield in 1943
• – Jeffrey Rowling (1943-1998)
• – Peter (Pete) Rowling (b. 1945)

• Peter (Pete) Rowling m. Anne Volant (1945-1990) in Islington, London in 1965.  They made their home in Gloucestershire.  After Anne’s death Pete rem. his secretary Janet Gallivan (b. 1953) in Newport in 1992
• – Joanne (Jo) Rowling (b. 1965)
• – Dianne (Di) Rowling (b. 1967) m. Roger Moore in Edinburgh in 1993

• Jo (JK) Rowling m. Jorge Arantes in Portugal in 1992, separated in 1993 and moved to Edinburgh in 1994; rem. Dr. Neil Murray in Mauritius in 2001
• – Jessica Rowling Arantes (b. 1993 in Portugal)
• – David Rowling Murray (b. 2003 in Scotland)
• – Mackenzie Rowling Murray (b. 2005 in Scotland)