Catherine Carey was born in early 1524 at the precise midpoint of her mother Mary Boleyn's affair with Henry VIII, which is either a coincidence or the most consequential piece of timing in her entire life, depending on which historians you read and how carefully you look at her portraits.
Mary Boleyn was born around 1499 or 1500, the eldest daughter of Thomas Boleyn and Elizabeth Howard, at the family estate of Blickling Hall in Norfolk, and history has spent five hundred years treating her as a footnote in her own sister's story.