[bgill]

Obama has more famous kin than John McCain, the Boston genealogist found. McCain, the likely GOP nominee for president, is sixth cousin to first lady Laura Bush.

Wow! Gee! How amazing! I bet eventually he'll even claim Adam and Eve as kin!!! Sorry, but as much as I enjoy genealogy, this is too much. Every family has a few skeletons and black sheep (no pun intended) somewhere down the line.

[hennie pennie]

What I have read several places is that if you have one ancestor whom you can trace to before 1680 in America, then you are literally related to many millions of Americans living today -- perhaps Muawiyah or Blam posted about this.

I think it's just astounding, but it's really just a genealogical fact -- the population was small, the available pool for marriages was such that anyone who can trace back to the 1500s or early 1600s America is related.

Astounding, hey? I thought it was a remarkable bit of trivia, how many Americans that Barack Hussein Obama is related to.

[muawiyah]

Uhh, not everybody.

BTW, the professionals probably missed the McCain family "name swap" with John Alexander McCain.

That's NOT always a middle name like we'd do it in modern times.

Sometimes it means the guy married "up" ~ like John did (alas, to money).

I think it's even money the guy is actually an Alexander descendant in the male line ~ and as such he's got as many relatives as Obama ~ and vice versa.

Actually, they end up with pretty much the SAME relatives, and so does Bill Clinton, the Bushes, Ronald Reagan, Jerry (King) Ford, Richard Millhouse/Mullis Nixon, Eisenhower, Truman, the Roosevelts, etc., etc.