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Posted on 09/17/2002 7:00:27 PM PDT by aculeus
President Bush is a great admirer of Sir Winston Churchill and keeps a bust of the wartime leader on his desk at the White House.
Yet while attempts to compare the two men have been dismissed as fanciful, it now turns out that they are from the same English stock.
Their common ancestry has been traced to the 15th century Northamptonshire squire Henry Spencer.
The president is also related to Princes William and Harry through their late mother's family.
The connections were made by genealogical researchers working for the American company MyFamily.com, which will today announce a collaboration with the Public Record Office in London to place census returns for England and Wales on the internet.
Through a subsidiary called Ancestry.co.uk, records from 1841 until 1901 will be available on a subscription basis.
When the PRO placed the 1901 census on its website earlier this year, the demand was so great that it crashed within hours. The service has yet to be fully restored.
Mr Bush's admiration for Sir Winston Churchill is well known MyFamily.com, which serves 13 million customers a month and is one of the largest subscription services on the internet, says it will avoid similar problems, however great the demand.
The project, which involves digitising seven million census records and indexing 130 million names, starts today when images of 1891 census returns for Oxfordshire are placed on the website. By the end of the year, all records for 1891 should be available.
Eventually, on-line subscribers will be able to access records from 1841 to 1901 - the most recent year for which census returns have been made public. Under UK law, they are kept secret for 100 years.
An undisclosed proportion of the subscription revenue will be returned to the PRO under the licence agreement with MyFamily.com.
The new ancestry website will be another addition to one of the most rapidly growing internet pastimes genealogical research.
Tom Stockham, president of MyFamily.com, said: "We want to make it possible for everyone to access information on their ancestors and gain an insight into the social and economic conditions that shaped their families."
The company's expertise in linking families uncovered a distant, though direct, relationship between the Spencer and Bush families.
Henry Spencer of Badby, Northants, who lived from around 1420 until 1478, married Isabella Lincoln, and their son William founded the line that would produce Winston Churchill and Diana, Princess of Wales.
The daughter of another son, John Spencer, married Sir William Cope and the descendants of this line eventually settled in the New World.
They included Anne Marbury, who was born in Lincolnshire but moved to Massachusetts in the 17th century, from where she was banished for religious reasons and killed by indians. A direct descendant, Harriet Fay, married James Bush, the great-great-grandfather of the current American president.
Mr Bush's admiration for Sir Winston Churchill is well known. Last year, after the September 11 atrocities, he borrowed some of Churchill's rhetorical flourishes for his address to Congress.
Mr Bush said Sir Winston "seemed like a Texan to me" because of his courage, decisiveness and strength of principle. It turns out that the family resemblance was stronger than he realised.
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Signed, The Illuminati
Outstanding Lone Stars shining brilliantly in a foaming sea of rot gut dunderheads.
Brooks-Baker says Gore still has a chance to prove he’s “royal enough” for the top job. “Like Jimmy Carter, it is possible that he is the product of several royal love children of the past,” Brooks-Baker says. “Those connections are harder to trace.”
Oh Man!
Wondering when the "Bush-Babe-Bots" will show up and start swooning...
Churchill would be 1 / 131,072 of Henry Spencer.
The would share 1 / 68,719,476,736 of the same genes.
Unfortunately there are only about 50,000 genes in the human genome. Therefore it is unlikely that they share any genetic material inherited in common from Henry Spencer.
OTOH, as another poster has pointed out, they come from the inbred upper crust of England, and are at least as similar as any other two of that wretched lot.
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