Carpentology

All in the Family

You Won’t Believe Who’s Related to Bush!

President George W. Bush and Senator John F. Kerry are related, according to Great Britain’s Guardian Unlimited and the December issue of Family Tree Magazine. The two presidential candidates share at least eight common ancestors, making them very distant cousins, says Family Tree. Emphasis on the word distant: The two are ninth cousins, twice removed, Massachusetts genealogist Gary Boyd Roberts told the Guardian Unlimited.

According to the British newspaper, both Bush and Kerry are descendants of one Edmund Reade, a member of the minor Essex gentry who lived in the early 1600s. Although he died without ever leaving England, his daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, sailed to New England with their mother in the 1630s. The two ladies married into powerful families named Winthrop and Lake, from which our two presidential candidates descend.

From Netscape “What’s New”