Ellen Wulfhorst
Reuters
Wednesday, Oct 8, 2008
Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin is distantly related to the late Princess Diana and late U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, genealogy experts said on Wednesday.
The governor of Alaska and the princess are tenth cousins, while Palin and Roosevelt are ninth cousins once removed, said Ancestry.com, online genealogists based in Provo, Utah.
The genealogical connections are not the first to gain attention in the U.S. presidential campaign. Last year, Lynne Cheney said she found while tracing her family roots that her husband Vice President Dick Cheney was a distant cousin of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.
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Other researchers discovered Obama is distant cousins with actor Brad Pitt.
“When you’ve got candidates who have deep roots in America, there’s a good chance that they’re going to have some famous cousins,” said Ancestry.com’s chief family historian Megan Smolenyak.
“We’ve all got literally millions of cousins. The trick is finding that one little connection that results in something like Sarah Palin being related to FDR or Diana,” she said.
Palin and the late princess descended from John Strong and his wife Abigail Ford, Ancestry.com said.
Strong was born around 1605 in England and emigrated to the United States, where he died in Massachusetts in 1699, Ancestry.com said.
This article was posted: Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 11:04 am
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