Who is michael ibsen

Skip to navigation. But for those who had been closely associated with the dig since its inception, the news was particularly striking. Michael, who was born in Canada and works as a furniture maker in London, first learned of his potential connection to the monarch in Michael was excited to hear earlier this year that Philippa Langley of the Richard III society had originated a dig at the site of Grey Friars church in Leicester — where Richard was believed to have buried.

Joy Ibsen died four years ago, but Michael was happy to help the team with DNA testing should any remains be found at the site. If they find something, our mtDNA could be useful in determining the identity of the remains. Richard's maternal-line - or mitochondrial - DNA was matched to two living relatives of his eldest sister Anne of York.

Michael Ibsen and Wendy Duldig are 14th cousins and both carry the same extremely rare genetic lineage as the body in the car park.

Richard III was defeated in battle by Henry Tudor, marking the end of the Plantagenet dynasty and the beginning of Tudor rule, which lasted until Queen Elizabeth I died childless in Richard's battered body was subsequently buried in Greyfriars. As the Leicester team uncovered the male skeleton, the curvature in its spine became obvious. The condition would have caused one of the man's shoulders to be higher than the other, just as a contemporary of Richard described.

Genes involved in hair and eye colour were also tested. The results suggest Richard III had blue eyes, matching one of the earliest known paintings of the king. But the researchers say the test is most closely correlated with childhood hair, and in some blond children, hair darkens during adolescence. The researchers took all the information linking the body to Richard III and carried out a statistical test known as Bayesian analysis to determine the probability that the body was indeed his - or not.

Despite the absence of a male-line genetic match, the results came back with a Commenting on the study, Prof Martin Richards, a population geneticist at the University of Huddersfield, told BBC News: "The work seems to have been done with great care and looks very convincing to me.

He said Richard III's maternal DNA type was very rare, and carried an additional genetic variant not previously seen before that "seems to be unique amongst a database that includes several thousand Europeans". Or perhaps the Ibsen line was the problem—maybe a daughter recorded on the family tree was adopted, thereby breaking the maternal DNA chain. No one knew. Richard III is the only English monarch denied a known resting place or tomb.

While Leicester has adopted Richard as one of its own—schools and statues are dedicated to the king—his likely burial spot, the Grey Friars complex, was one of hundreds of Catholic institutions demolished by Henry VIII.

All that remains are medieval maps. After centuries of building and demolition, the area is filled with government buildings and backed by parking lots, including one belonging to the social services department. In , Langley went to Leicester.

She worked hard to raise funds for the dig, much from the Richard III Society, including its Canadian branch which had all of 68 members , and got officials and scientists to sign on for a two-week excavation of three trenches in that social services parking lot. On Aug. While cameras snapped, he swabbed the inside of a cheek to provide a fresh DNA sample, handing it to King, the University of Leicester geneticist.

Then he returned to London. The next day, they found bones. The remains were lying a few feet from where Langley first stopped cold. The scientists undertook the delicate work of uncovering the body, stuffed into a too-short grave without coffin or shroud. Early on Sept. They decided to treat the identification project like a missing-person case: They had a man in his early 30s with numerous battle injuries and severe scoliosis.

Only by piling evidence on top of evidence in a logical manner would they prove their case. His team had to make the connection with historically provenanced documents.

They found themselves trapped in multiple dead ends. She provided a DNA sample. Meanwhile, King was busy. It matched. Using samples from the remains, she found a small section, then another, and tacked them all together to create the full DNA sequences. On Feb. That could only mean one thing: the skeleton was Richard III.

Today, there are likely millions of descendants of the Plantagenet dynasty, whose rule over England ended with Richard in that muddy field at Bosworth. It was a singular experience. There is a part of him, a tangible physical part of him that is part of me. Last December, an exhaustive paper was published in Nature Communications.

King did a whole-genome sequence match on the two cousins. Ibsen was a perfect match to the maternal DNA of the king found in the parking lot. Great gales of laughter echoed down the line to Ibsen. Michael Ibsen has worked in the same complex in north London for 25 years, where his tiny sq. On one side of his shop is a man who makes badges, while a harp maker works downstairs.

People were putting his name forward as a regal coffin builder even before the dig began. She immediately rang Ibsen. It may not have happened if Ibsen had kept to his first passion. Though he enjoyed industrial arts in the other London, the Ontario city where he grew up, he had to choose between that and music. He picked the latter, studying the French horn and cello at Western University and spent a few years freelancing as a musician in the Netherlands and Germany.

By the mids, he was in London, England, reconsidering his options. He eventually took a course in joinery, learning to make all the traditional woodworking joints by hand.