According Israeli genealogy website, MyHeritage, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton seem to be 19th cousins (go figure that one out!). The two front-running rivals for Presidential office apparently share a common ancestor from England going back 18 generations.
Conventionally, we sometimes say there are only six degrees of separation, between anybody and anybody else, in many kinds of social groupings, so this is just a little more remote.
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Their common ancestors are John of Gaunt, the then duke of Lancaster, and his third wife Katherine Swynford, with whom he had what may be described as a “modern” relationship before they finally married and settled down together.
This is not the only surprise for the Presidential hopefuls as the genealogists say that King Edward III of England, John of Gaunt’s dad, therefore just happens to be their 19th-great-grandfather.
MyHeritage.com, was created by Gilad Japhet in 2003 to help people research their genealogy. Today it supports over 40 languages and has over 75 million users internationally every year.
The discovery of s distant relationship between The Donald and Hillary Clinton was made when a study was commissioned by an American TV station that sought to determine if the candidates were somehow related.
In 2007, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama were also found to distant cousins. Something made public by the Cheney’swife, Lynne, while researching her own ancestry. Genealogy really is the hand the whole family can play.
Below is the whole chain, courtesy of the genealogists’ website.