By Ian Bred, Norfolk Correspondent

American President Donald Trump’s ancestors were Norfolk farmers with an incredible modern-day link to the Queen, we can reveal today.

We traced his family tree going back many generations, and discovered his ancestors eked out a living on farmland that is now part of Her Majesty’s sprawling Sandringham Estate.

Our special investigation featured weeks of sifting through thousands of documents and old photographs at the Norfolk Central Records Office, which unearthed the extraordinary Trump heritage in the village of West Newton, just south of Sandringham.

Mr Trump’s great, great-grandfather Archibald “Archie” Trump bought eight acres of land in 1827, and he toiled for more than 50 years with the help of his sons Abraham and Henry, before he died in 1879, aged 68.

The family endured many hardships, yet young Henry – who was Donald Trump’s great-grandfather – displayed some business acumen by being featured in an early edition of the Eastern Daily Press newspaper, posing for the camera as part of a feature about rearing geese.

Take a gander: Henry Trump, the President’s great grandfather, pictured as a young manHenry displays many of the distinctive Trump features as a young boy, but as he grew older he bore an uncanny resemblance to Donald Trump. We discovered another photo of Henry, believed to be taken in 1880, just after his father’s death.

He would have been around 35 years old at this point, and the photograph, which featured in the West Newton parish newsletter, shows Henry was still working the land, as he poses proudly with a hay fork. He even has tiny hands!

Family features: Henry as an older man was the spitting image of DonaldHenry had one son – Donald Trump’s grandfather, Isaac – who moved to the remote Isle of Lewis in Scotland when the family sold their Norfolk land to the Sandringham Estate, which had been the country retreat of British monarchs since 1868.

It seems extraordinary now that the Trump family’s first business venture, a smallholding farm in Norfolk, was sold to the British Royal Family.

The rest of the Trump family history is more commonly known. Isaac raised three daughters on the Isle of Lewis, one of whom was the President’s mother, Mary Anne, who moved to America in 1930 to work as a house servant.