BREAKING NEWS: Hereditary Prince Ferdinand zu Leiningen to wed ....

@Stig Sivebæk Nielsen

Confirmed...  Hereditary Prince Ferdinand of Leiningen, eldest son of the Prince and Princess of Leiningen will marry Princess Viktoria Luise von Preussen, only daughter of the late Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia and Ehrengard von Reden.   Their civil wedding will take place on  April 29 at Amorbach.   The religious wedding will take place on September 16.

Can I say that I am over the moon about this marriage.  This is a young couple in love, soon to make a life-long commitment to each other.  In the true scheme of things: titles mean nothing, What is important -- most important -- is the love and respect that this couple have for each other.

For me, this is a terrific story.   I have spent more than 40 years(!) studying, updating the descendants of Victoria and Albert.   Two books.  I try to keep the descendants up to date.  This will be a truly grand wedding in Amorbach in September.

This will be the first marriage between two descendants of  Queen Victoria since the 1981 marriage of Ferdinand's parents, Prince Andreas of Leiningen and Princess Alexandra of Hanover.

Ferdinand and Viktoria Luise are third cousins through Victoria's eldest daughter, Victoria who married Friedrich III of Germany.   Both descend from Vicky and Fritz's elder son, Kaiser Wilhelm II.   They both have direct descent from Wilhelm's wife, Princess Auguste Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein, whose grandmother, Princess Feodore of Leiningen was Queen Victoria's older half sister.

The couple are both double descendants of Queen Victoria.   Both also descend from Victoria's fourth child, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, through his second daughter, Victoria Melita, and her second husband, Grand Duke Kirill of Russia.  

Victoria Melita and Kirill's elder daughter, Grand Duchess Marie married  Karl, 6th Prince of Leiningen.  Ferdinand is their great-grandson.    Their younger daughter, Grand Duchess Kira, married Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, the grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II.  Viktoria Luise, who was named for her great-great-aunt, Princess Viktoria Luise of Prussia, only daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who, in 1913, married Prince Ernst August of Hanover, Duke of Brunswick und Lüneburg.  Hereditary Prince Ferdinand is the late Duchess' great-grandson.

The couple became engaged in January.

Hereditary Prince Ferdinand Heinrich Emich Christian Karl of Leiningen was born on August 12, 1982 at Frankfurt-am-Main.  He is the heir apparent to Schloss Amorbach and the family estates.

http://www.fuerst-leiningen.de/en/_willkommen.html

Princess Viktoria Luise Kira Ehrengard von Preussen was born on May 2, 1982 at Berlin.

In 2010,  Viktoria Luise made her debut at the Hotel Crillon ball.   She has an older half-brother, Philip, from her father's first marriage, and two full brothers,  Friedrich Wilhelm, a lawyer, and Joachim, the manager of Accenture Strategy in Berlin.   Prince Philip is the pastor at the Lutheran church in Birkenwerder, near Berlin.  http://www.kirche-berlin-nordost.de/page/390/birkenwerder

Viktoria Luise attended the Lakefield College School in Ontario, Canada, and studied at the American University in Paris.   Since August 2013, she has worked for Hauck & Aufhäuser, a private German bank, established in 1796.  She is the Business Manager CFO/COO (Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Office) in the bank's Frankfurt-am-Main office.