Of Course It Would Have to be John

All US Presidents but one are cousins of King John of England. You remember King John?



The song isn't very good history, really: John not only was the first King John of England, he was the last one. The "mom" he allegedly calls for was Eleanor of Aquitaine, which is the consolation prize: if all our Presidents are related to John, they're also related to her, and to his brother, Richard the Lionheart.

Still, good history or not, the song does bear a certain similarity to current events...

4 comments:

douglas said...

At that many generations down the line, an awful lot of people are related, so long as they're from the same geographic area. I'd bet hundreds of thousands of Americans can make the same claim. As one commenter there said- 'It isn't amazing that 42 of 43 were related to him, it's amazing that Martin Van Buren wasn't.'

Grim said...

1215 was a long time ago. More recently, though, all US Presidents are related to George Washington either by blood or marriage; and, on my mother's side, I'm descended from Benjamin Church.

And that -- the Washington part, at least -- is kind of interesting. There's something going on at levels we don't quite know how to track; it's not just that we're all related, not when we're talking about 200 years (and much less, through most of the period we're discussing). There are some kinds of invisible networks that are involved, in ways we don't quite get.

Anonymous said...

Well, when my uncle died, my dad learned that we are related to a whooole lot more of Tennessee than we ever guessed. It seems that a researcher found a petition of legitimacy filed by an ancestor to the TN state legislature in the 1870s, asking to have his 20 children by two women legitimized so that the boys could vote! Apparently the legislature did not find time to take up the proposal. And here we thought the Mormon branch of the family was a little different . . .

LittleRed1

douglas said...

Well, people might be related to George Washington, but he never had children with Martha- he may have been rendered sterile from smallpox- so there are no direct descendants of George Washington. Even so, he was born 234 years ago- that's about 11 generations, so there's still a pretty large number of people who could be related to his siblings. That and perhaps a little bit of 'it's who you know' and of course all the Presidents have been related to him.