Ursula von der Leyen is mainly of German descent and has one English American great-grandmother. The Albrecht family was among the patrician (hübsche) families of the Electorate of Hanover—a state that was in a personal union with the United Kingdom; her great-great-grandfather George Alexander Albrecht moved to Bremen in the 19th century, where he became a wealthy cotton merchant, part of the Hanseatic elite and the Austro-Hungarian Consul from 1895. He married the daughter of Baron Ludwig Knoop, one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the 19th century Russian Empire.[8] Their son was the cotton merchant Friedrich Carl Albrecht, who married Mary Ladson Robertson (1883–1960), an American from Charleston, South Carolina of colonial English planter class descent. von der Leyen's great-grandmother was the daughter of the Charleston cotton merchant Edward Twells Robertson and Sarah Gilmor Ladson; Edward Robertson established the Edward T. Robertson & Son company that was active as controllers in the international cotton business.[9] The family is included in the book The Prominent Families of the United States of America.[10] Mary Ladson Robertson was a member of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America and a descendant of South Carolina governor Thomas Smith.[11] Ursula von der Leyen's grandfather Friedrich Carl Albrecht was a physician and psychotherapist. She is the niece of the conductor George Alexander Albrecht and a first cousin of the chief conductor of the Dutch National Opera Marc Albrecht.[12]
She is married to Heiko von der Leyen, a professor of medicine, the CEO of a medical engineering company and a member of the von der Leyen family, an aristocratic family noted as silk merchants and industrialists.
