is the son of Clinton Eastwood (whose mid-Atlantic Eastwood descent is traceable to Richard Eastwood, the first Eastwood in America (Jamestown, Virginia 1642), and Margaret Ruth Runner, daughter of Waldo Errol Runner and Virginia May  McClanahan, whose ancestry is traceable to Gov. William Bradford of the famed Mayflower and Plymouth colony. *See "Mayflower Compact"

Excerpts from Clint Eastwood Biographies:

About Clint Eastwood's maternal ancestors, from: McGilligan, pages 11-12:
Clint's maternal forebears were among the first settlers of New England, where they organized their lives around land, community, authority and public worship.
William Bartholomew - the first recorded American ancestor on the Runner side of the clan [on Clint Eastwood's mother's side] - was the well-born son of a Burford, England, family... William sired William Jr., probably the first Bartholomew born in the New World, in 1640 or 1641... William Jr. wed Mary Johnson, and their son Andrew married Hanna Frisbie of Branford, Connecticut... In his lifetime Andrew was able to amass large quantities of real estate in [Connecticut]... he was well known locally for being active in church and civic affairs...

More about Clint Eastwood's maternal ancestors, from: McGilligan, pages 13-14:
The intermarriage of the Bartholomews and the Kelloggs more than qualifies Clint for the Mayflower Society. The first Kelloggs had arrived in America during the height of the Puritan emigration, from 1620 to 1640... One famous descendant was W. K. Kellogg of Michigan, the king of breakfast cereal foods [and a devout Seventh-day Adventist].
The Kelloggs and Bartholomews would erect Newburg's first schoolhouse and Congregational church... 'These were the days of the log schoolhouse, the spelling bees, and the singing schools and the little community church.'
...After leaving from Galesburg, Illinois, in April 1849, the Bartholomew-led group arrived in Salt Lake City in September, too late to explore the frigid northern route across the mountains. A tracker offered to take them by the Old Spanish Trail to the south. 'There was divided judgment about whether to continue westward or to winter in Salt Lake City because it was too late in the season... A previous Donner Pass winter disaster crated the hesitation. [This part of the family tree next went from Salt Lake City to Sacramento, California.]

More about Clint Eastwood's maternal ancestors, from: McGilligan, pages 15-16:
Early in 1863 a Bartholomew caravan set out for Mound City, Kansas... Older brother Noyes Ellsworth [Bartholomew]... followed with his wife and children in 1866... The Bartholomew bothers were founding members of the 1866 society that built the town's firs Congregational church. Noyes Ellsworth acted as the church's first deacon and served in that capacity for twenty-four years.
...Linn County [Kansas] had one of the first 'Women's Rights' associations, and Cordellia Bartholomew was among those who helped to organize what was probably the first women's club west of the Mississippi, the Ladies' Enterprise Society of Mound City, which had as its goal the erection of a Mound City Free Meeting House for religious worship, educational meetings, scientific, literary and political lectures... the matter of a new building for school, Sunday school, church, lecture-room was of vital importance to them.

More about Clint Eastwood's maternal ancestors, from: McGilligan, page 17:
C. C. Runner was one of the rascals of the dynasty... C. C. was born in 1857, probably in Virginia. Inevitably he fell in love with Edward Franklin's eldest daughter Sophia, and C. C. and Sophia were married in 1881, probably at the Congregational church in Buena Vista, where Samuel Dana Bartholomew, her uncle, had just been elected deacon. Their first child was born in Buena Vista, Colorado, on 17 February 1882: that was Waldo Errol Runner, Clint's maternal grandfather.

More about Clint Eastwood's maternal ancestors, from: McGilligan, page 19:
Sophia [i.e., Clint Eastwood's maternal great-grandmother: Sophia Franklin Runner] converted to Christian Science, which wasn't such a radical departure from Congregationalism, but according to relatives her fervent beliefs disrupted the family. At one point, following Christian Science dictates, she refused to call a physician for a seriously ill daughter, who later died. Religion held no allure for C. C. [Clint Eastwood's maternal great-grandfather], and fatherhood had outlived its glow. The Yukon gold rush sounded its siren call, and by 1898 C. C. could be found in Alaska in the company of a woman named Lizzie Burke. Sophia was so outraged by his desertion that she began to list him as 'dead' on official records. It is doubtful she ever laid eyes on her vagabond husband again.

Among Clint Eastwood's ancestors, the one that seems most like a prototypical Clint Eastwood movie character was Henry Green Boyle, a devout Latter-day Saint whose interesting story is recounted in McGilligan's biography of Eastwood.

From: McGilligan, pages 20-21:
In July of 1903, Waldo Errol Runner - C. C. and Sophia's firstborn [Clint Eastwood's maternal grandfather] - had married Virginia May McClanahan, in a ceremony presided over by the pastor of the First M. E. Church in Pueblo, Colorado. ["First M. E. Church" is probably a Methodist Episcopal Church.]
Virginia May was a product of the Pennsylvania and St Joseph, Missouri, Boyles and the Virginia McCorkles and McClanahans... Boyles in Virginia served as notable doctors, preachers and legislators...
The Boyles were rugged, righteous folk, who acted like some Clint screen characters. Henry Green Boyle, born a Methodist, was converted to Mormonism, and one day in the early 1840s, he chanced to meet a Virginia town constable, a notorious 'bad man' named Henry McDowel, who spoke ill of Mormons and taunted him. 'I did not want any trouble with him, & told him that I did not, but nothing but a row would satisfy him,' he wrote in a diary. After a heated exchange of insults, Boyle knocked the constable down. 'He got up,' wrote Boyle, & I knocked him down the Second time after Strikeing him three times. I struck him in the face & eyes & mouth until the blood poured from him, but he managed to get up with me (for he was a Stout man, & weighted 180 lbs) & throwed me back over a chair into the corner of the counter among Some nail keggs & castings. 'McDowel was getting out his knife to use it on me, when I picked up an oven lid that happened to be near, & I Struck McDowel three times . . . This laid him out lifeless . . . 'I was not hurt a particle, but it was a long time before McDowel was brought to his right Senses. He did not speak for two days, & he did not get well for Six Months. Most all the people in the community were glad that I had used him up."  

The marriage of Waldo Errol Runner and Virginia May McClanahan would eventually produce three children... [including Clint Eastwood's mother] Margaret Ruth (b. 1909) [who] didn't come along until California, to where the Runners had moved by 1904.
This [move] included Sophia Bartholomew, Clint's great-grandmother [Waldo Errol Runner's mother], who materialized in the Oakland City Directory of 1910, advertising her occupation as 'Christian Scientist practitioner'...
Although Waldo and Virginia May initially lived in Oakland neighborhoods, they steadily improved their lot in life, and their 1920s address at 169 Ronada was situated in Piedmont [next to Oakland, California] about six blocks away from Burr Eastwood's home; not only did the Runners and Eastwoods have similar backgrounds in mining and business, but their children attended the same neighborhood churches and mingled in school classes.
Although many of Clint Eastwood's most recent ancestors were Congregationalists, and his great grandmother was a devout Christian Scientist, the preference of his family for general Protestantism without loyalty to any specific denomination was in evidence when Eastwood's parents were married in an "Interdenominational" church.

From: McGilligan, page 22:
Ruth's father Waldo [Clint Eastwood's maternal grandfather] had done a C. C. [i.e., done the same thing his father did] when Ruth was about sixteen, leaving his wife and separating from her geographically, moving down to Los Angeles... essentially Ruth Runner [Clint Eastwood's mother] was left fatherless, just as Clinton [Clint Eastwood's father], whose mother had die din 1925, was motherless. This common lack must have forged a bond between them... The Eastwood-Runner [Clint Eastwood's parents] marriage certificate of 5 June 27 shows that Ruth, eighteen, toiled as an accountant for an insurance company while Clinton was working as a cashier. The clergyman who presided over their exchange of vows was Rev. Charles D. Milliken, pastor of Piedmont's Interdenominational church.

Schickel, page 20:
Still, Clint Eastwood's heritage is far from piratical. It is essentially middle class, marked by the kind of modest strivings, setbacks and successes common to that class. His father and mother, Clinton Sr. and Margaret Ruth Runner--always known by her middle name--were sweethearts from a very tender age. He was fifteen, she thirteen, when they met in Piedmont, California, not long after her family moved from San Francisco to this prosperous Bay Area suburb, which lies due east of Oakland, due south of Berkeley. His father, Burr, built a house there soon after Clinton Sr. was born and worked as a manager in a wholesale hardware concern. Ruth's father, Waldo, had been a railroad executive--she moved back and forth across the country several times as a child because of his work--and then founded, with a partner, the Graybar Company, which manufactured automobile bumpers and luggage racks.

Schickel, page 32:
Treasured among these films and stars [that Clint Eastwood saw while growing up] is one slightly more exotic title, "Forty Thousand Horsemen". The story of an Australian cavalry brigade that fought in Palestine in World War I, it starred Chips Rafferty. It was made in 1940 and entered the world market a couple of years later. Its dialogue contained a few mild, but in those days shocking, cuss words.   Clint  remembers going to it with his family and, when the first "hell" or "damn" was heard, being aware of respectable citizens leaving the theater. The Eastwoods soon followed, But, "I snuck back later because I wanted to see the whole movie; it had a lot of action--horses, and lancers and what have you."

McGilligan, page 64:
Interestingly, here, in his first public exposure [his first film appearance, in "Revenge of the Creature"], Clint [Eastwood] was already advertising his affection for animals and small, helpless creatures. This, one of the most over-publicized 'facts' about the actor, turns up in countless interviews and articles, and inevitably will find its way into any conversation with friends or colleagues about Clint. Apparently it is a Clint truism, or what people close to him call a
Rats in pockets would also turn up in "Escape from Alcatraz". Pet dogs and squirrels on park benches and other cute animals were guaranteed cutaways in Clint films. But the very first one, the laboratory rat in "Revenge of the Creature", was in the original script. Did this "Clintism" originate in boyhood, as is often claimed, or did it, perhaps, start here, in "Revenge of the Creature"? One thing that quickly became clear about Clint is that as an actor he was always borrowing from other people's ideas of him. And when something clicked for Clint, it was absorbed and integrated into the persona.

McGilligan, page 224:
Roxanne Tunis was still in the star's life [as one of Clint Eastwood's many girlfriends] - and frequently in the background of his films. She was given menial parts so that she could be with Clint on the set... In the early 1970s, however, Tunis declared herself a full-time follower of 'a higher spiritual path', and told Clint she didn't want the karmic responsibility of poisoning his marriage. She, and her daughter Kimber, soon moved to Denver where Kimber entered private school. There, according to sources sympathetic to Tunis, mother and daughter saw Clint on his regular skiing trips, probably more often than before.

McGilligan, pages 231-232:
There was one member of the Eastwood family actually living a true-life love story.
Just after "Breezy" was completed, two years after the death of her husband, Clint's mother, Ruth Eastwood, entered into a second marriage with John Belden Wood...

Clint Eastwood’s maternal grandfather, W. E. Runner, was the son of Charles Claude Runner and Sophia Aurelia Bartholomew (b. 1859), who appears on p. 322 of the 1885 Record of the Bartholomew Family by George Wells Bartholomew. Sophia Aurelia’s parents were Edward Franklin Bartholomew, b. 1828 in Wallingford, Conn., later of Pueblo and elsewhere in Colorado, and his wife Cordelia Kellogg, b. 1829 in Egremont, Mass., who appears on pp. 584 and 1265 of The Kelloggs in the Old World and the New, 3 vols. (1903) by Timothy Hopkins.

McGilligan cites the Bartholomew and Kellogg genealogies – he is a bit of a genealogist himself – but from further printed sources, almost the entire New England ancestry of Sophia Aurelia Bartholomew can be traced. Not only were Edward Franklin Bartholomew and his parents born in Wallingford, so too was Jane (Hall) Kellogg, the wife of Edward Kellogg and mother of Cordelia. With adroit use of Families of Ancient New Haven (9 vols., 1922-39, repr. 1974) by Donald Lines Jacobus, The History of Wallingford (1870) by Charles H.S. Davis, The Halls of New England (1883, Halls of Wallingford section) by D.B. Hall, plus only a few more sources, we can readily identify Sophia Aurelia’s grandparents as Noyes Dana Bartholomew and Elizabeth Hall, and Edward Kellogg and Jane Hall; her great-grandparents as Andrew Bartholomew and Rachel Royce, Samuel Hall (IV) and Elizabeth Parsons, Ephraim Kellogg, Jr., and Jane Ashley, and Hezekiah Hall and Esther Lewis; and her great-great-grandparents as Joseph Bartholomew and Mary Sexton, Reuben Royce and Keziah Moss, Samuel Hall (III) and Sarah Hull, John Parsons and Esther Hall (sister of Samuel [III]), Ephraim Kellogg and Ruth Hosmer, William Ashley and Jane Dutcher, Samuel Hall (IV) and Elizabeth Parsons again, and (probably) Samuel Lewis and Esther Sperry.

Of the just-listed sixteen New England great-great-great-great-great-grandparents of Clint Eastwood, Reuben Royce was the son of Joseph Royce, Jr. and Anna Andrews, grandson of Joseph Royce and Mary Porter, and of Samuel Andrews, Jr. and Anna Hall, and great-grandson of Millard Fillmore forebears Nehemiah Royce (son of my ancestors Robert and Mary [----] Royce, see column #58) and Hannah Morgan (daughter of Princess of Wales forebears James Morgan and Margery Hill), and of Samuel Andrews and Elizabeth Peck (again my ancestors, see column #58). Keziah Moss, Reuben’s wife, was the daughter of John Moss (III) and Elizabeth Hall, granddaughter of John Moss, Jr. and Martha Lathrop, and great-granddaughter of U.S. Grant and FDR forebears Samuel Lathrop and Elizabeth Scudder. Samuel’s parents, Rev. John Lathrop and Hannah House, are also ancestors of the two Presidents Bush; and the notable Lathrop progeny is the subject of column #56. Scudder and Stoughton kinsmen of Mrs. Elizabeth Scudder Lathrop were the subjects of columns #s 22 and 23.

Samuel Hall (III) was the son of Samuel Hall, Jr. and Love Royce, daughter of Nathaniel Royce (another son of Robert Royce and Mary ----) and Sarah Lathrop (another daughter of Samuel Lathrop and Elizabeth Scudder). Sarah Hull, wife of Samuel Hall (III), was the daughter of Benjamin Hull and Elizabeth Andrews (another child of Samuel Andrews and Elizabeth Peck). Esther (Hall) Parsons, as suggested above, was also a child of Samuel Hall, Jr. and Love Royce.

Ruth Hosmer, wife of Ephraim Kellogg, was a daughter of Thomas Hosmer and Susannah Steele, daughter of Thomas Steele (and Susannah Webster), son of Samuel Steele and Mercy Bradford, daughter of William Bradford, Jr. and Alice Richards. William Bradford, Jr. was of course the son of Gov. William Bradford of the Mayflower and his wife Mrs. Alice Carpenter Southworth, and Alice Richards was the daughter of FDR and Bush ancestors Thomas and Wealthian (Loring?) Richards. William Ashley, husband of Jane Dutcher, was the son of Aaron Ashley and Sarah Day, daughter of John Day and Mary Smith, granddaughter of Thomas Day and Sarah Cooper (ancestors of Hayes) and of John Smith and Mary Partridge (ancestors of Hayes), and great-granddaughter of Robert Day and Editha Stebbins (ancestors of Cleveland) and of Samuel Smith of South Hadley and his wife Elizabeth Smith (ancestors of Cleveland and the two Bushes).

Hezekiah Hall, husband of Esther Lewis and father of Jane (Hall) Kellogg, was, as already noted, another child of Samuel Hall (IV) and Elizabeth Parsons, so Royce-Lathrop-Scudder-Stoughton-Andrews-Peck and Royce-Scudder-Lathrop descents are repeated. Esther Lewis, wife of Hezekiah Hall, is probably the Esther listed on p. 1087 of Families of Ancient New Haven, daughter of Samuel Lewis and Esther Sperry, granddaughter of Ichabod Lewis and Esther Hall, and great-granddaughter of Caleb Hall and Esther Humphreville. Esther Humphreville’s maternity is uncertain, but her father Samuel Humphreville was the son of John (H) Umfraville of New Haven (and ----), an immigrant for whom a royal descent from Henry I of England (d. 1035) has recently been suggested (see The Royal Descents of 500 Immigrants to the American Colonies or the United States Who Were Themselves Notable or Left Descendants Notable in American History [2002 ed.], p. 657) by Anthony Hoskins (see also TAG 72 [1997]: 15-19).

Thus the actor Clint Eastwood, a movie icon for almost 40 years, has a likely royal descent, a Mayflower line (Bradford), ancestors in common with the late Princess of Wales, Prince William, and Prince Harry (James Morgan and Margery Hill), various presidential connections, and numerous kinships to my own Wallingford-born great-great-great-grandmother (Sarah [Hough] Root). In the next column, I will treat the also-surprising New England ancestry, also brought to my attention by Michael J. Wood, of a somewhat older California novelist, several of whose works have become screen classics.