Newsmaker
Obama, Scott Brown are cousins: genealogist
(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-01-31 21:56
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 This combined photo shows US President Barack Obama (L) and Republican Senator-elect Scott Brown. [Agencies] |
BOSTON: It was bad enough that President Barack Obama lost his US Senate super majority to a Republican. Now it turns out he also lost it to a relative.
Genealogists said on Friday that the Democratic president and the newly elected senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, are 10th cousins.
The New England Historic Genealogical Society said Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and Brown's mother, Judith Ann Rugg, both descend from Richard Singletary of Haverhill, Massachusetts.
"I think it's a really interesting thing, where you have the separation between a Democrat and a Republican, but you have one link," said David Allen Lambert, the society genealogist who co-discovered the connection with colleague Chris Child.
Lambert said the work was aided by prior research about Obama, as well as Brown's cooperation with the society when researchers first contacted him in December.
"I'm glad to be in such distinguished company," Brown said of the findings.
In 2008, the society discovered that Obama is related to seven prior presidents, including George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S. Truman and James Madison. They also learned he was related to actor Brad Pitt.
Brown, once a little-known state senator, jolted the national political landscape by capturing the Senate seat held for nearly a half-century by the late Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy.
When he is seated, Brown will become the 41st Republican in the Senate. That means the Democrats will no longer hold the 60-vote supermajority needed to overcome Republican procedural maneuvers to block votes on legislation such as a health care reform bill, Obama's top legislative priority.
The genealogical chart shows that Obama descends from Richard's eldest son, Jonathan Singletary. He later changed his surname to Dunham. Brown, meanwhile, descends from Jonathan's brother, Nathaniel Singletary.
