A CITY council candidate who set out to research a family connection with Portugal was amazed to find he is a descendent of William the Conqueror.

Darryl Telles, 54, a Labour Party member running for Adelaide and Brunswick ward in Hove in the May elections, has spent five years tracing his ancestry.

As well as uncovering royal links, he found he is also descended from a Portuguese slave owner.

Darryl, who was born in Nairobi, Kenya, found his ancestors had lived in Brazil, Portugal and that he even had links with the Spanish, English and Swabian royal family.

He said: “I researched my family tree because of Brexit. I was interested in my ancestry and I wanted to prove a connection with Portugal as I wanted to, some day, apply for a Portuguese passport.

“My maternal grandfather, Alfredo Francisco Simoes, kept his Portuguese citizenship and I had a conversation with my great aunt 30 years ago about our Portuguese ancestry from my mother’s side.

“My parents were born in Goa, India, which was a Portuguese colony. I began my research in Geni.com and that traced my family back four generations.”

When Darryl had some names, he did a search on Google and found that one of his ancestors, Domingos Francisco de Araujo Rozo, who was born in 1785, travelled from Portugal to Brazil as it was a colony.

He said: “He was a land owner and my heart sank when I discovered he was also a slave owner.

“The country house he owned is now the parliament for the City of Rio.

“He married Leonor Ribeiro de Espirito Santo and they had a son named Domingos Francisco de Aráujo de Castro Rozo, who was born in 1802.

“He was a captain in the army but he didn’t follow his father’s footsteps as he studied art.

“He married a Brazilian heiress and Dominigos spent the family fortune, hosted extravagant parties and gambled.

“He was disgraced and went to Goa.”

Darryl traced further back and discovered he was a descendant of the likes of King Sancho IV of Castille in Spain (born 1258) and King Ferdinand III of Castille (born 1199), who became a saint. He married Princess Elizabeth of Swabia.

Darryl said: “I should have expected a connection with other European royal families because they had intermarriages.

“It was a fascinating discovery that one of my ancestors was William the Conqueror. I’ve always been fascinated about Norman history, I did my A-levels on the Normans and Anglo-Saxons.

“I learnt so much from this research, I learnt that there is no such thing as ‘pure English’ or a definitive way of saying what British people should look like.

“As my family tree has just proved, we all come from different places and we are more connected than we think.

“I have plans to do talks at school, just to show children that identity is fluid and to encourage them to trace back their ancestry.

“Some people don’t think I am British enough. I support the English football team wherever I go and I think my ancestry can prove I am more English than they think.”