The Gates Family Tree, Explained

The Gates family spans six generations of the Pacific Northwest — from a 19th-century furniture-store owner who joined the Klondike Gold Rush, through three generations of Seattle bankers and lawyers, to the Microsoft co-founder whose foundation now spends down at scale, and on to the Olympics-adjacent, TikTok-native grandchildren of today. This guide walks through who's who.

How to read the graph

Each circle is a person. Solid lines connect spouses; dashed lines mark divorces. Parent-to-child lines descend by generation, with rows G1 (oldest) at the top and G6 (Bill's grandchildren) at the bottom. Click a node to focus on it; drag to rearrange the layout.

Generation 1 — the Pacific Northwest roots

Two great-grandfathers anchor the tree. On the paternal side, William Henry Gates ran a furniture store in the Pacific Northwest and joined the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush in Dawson City — Bill is the fourth William Henry Gates in the line, which is where the family nickname "Trey" comes from. On the maternal side, James Willard Maxwell Sr. was president of National City Bank in Seattle from 1911 to 1929 and a director of the Federal Reserve's Seattle branch. Bill Gates is, in effect, third-generation Seattle banker money on his mother's side.

Generation 2 — the grandparents

William Henry Gates I and Lillian Rice anchored the family in Bremerton, Washington. J.W. Maxwell carried his father's banking lineage forward as another national bank president, and married Adelle Thompson of Enumclaw, Washington around 1927.

Generation 3 — Bill Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates

Bill Gates Sr. (1925–2020) was a Seattle attorney — UW Law '50, WWII Army veteran — who co-founded the law firm that became K&L Gates and later co-chaired the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He married Mary Maxwell in 1951; she was a banker, UW regent, and the first woman to chair the United Way's national executive committee. There she sat alongside IBM CEO John Opel — an introduction widely credited with helping land Microsoft the IBM-PC operating-system contract in 1980. The MS-DOS deal that minted the first Microsoft fortune is, in part, a story about a mother on a non-profit board. Mary died of cancer in 1994; Bill Sr. married art historian Mimi Gardner in 1996.

Generation 4 — Bill, his sisters, and his partners

Bill is the middle of three siblings: Kristi Gates Blake (older; CPA, ran the family's Gates Investments office) and Libby Gates Armintrout (younger; Lakeside School board). Bill married Melinda French in 1994 and co-founded the foundation with her; the two divorced in 2021, and Melinda left the foundation in 2024 to focus on Pivotal Ventures. Bill's current partner is Paula Hurd, a tech-industry executive and widow of former Oracle/HP CEO Mark Hurd.

Generation 5 — Bill's children

Three children from Bill's marriage to Melinda. Jennifer is a Mount Sinai physician (2024) and competitive show jumper, married to Olympic equestrian Nayel Nassar — born in Chicago, raised in Kuwait, and a Tokyo-2020 representative for Egypt. Rory keeps a deliberately low profile (Duke/Fuqua MBA, no social media). Phoebe finished Stanford in three years, co-founded the digital fashion startup Phia, co-hosts "The Burnouts" on Alex Cooper's Unwell Network, and made the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30.

Generation 6 — the grandchildren

Leila Nassar (b. March 2023) is Bill's first grandchild; her sister Mia Nassar (b. October 2024) arrived on her parents' third wedding anniversary. Both are Egyptian-American by ancestry through Nayel.

A century-plus in dates

Generation by generation

From the furniture store to the grandchildren

The shortest path from the family's earliest documented ancestor to Bill's first grandchild runs through five generations of Pacific Northwest Gateses.