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Comment by adverbly

12 days ago

I couldn't believe this so I had to Google it. First cousins once removed. I don't really know what to think about this...

29 comments

adverbly

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jasonvorhe  12 days ago

All US presidents are directly related to each other: https://curiousmindmagazine.com/all-us-presidents-including-...

The world's a stage. :)

  • teleforce  12 days ago

    That means they're descendent of arguably the most powerful woman in the world's history, Eleanor the Aquitaine [1].

    She's married to both King of France and King of England, and mother of three kings during her lifetime including King John Lackland Plantagenet (progenitor of all 43 US presidents except one).

    This takes a new meaning to the popular idiom "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree".

    [1] Eleanor of Aquitaine:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_of_Aquitaine

  • godelski  11 days ago

    The bottom of that link has a video that is far more meaningful[0]

    It asks the question if the presidents are more related to one another than to another random group. The answer to this is no.

    This is probably pretty obvious if you actually look at population sizes through time[1]. There's 8 billion people alive today, but we have a billion less in 2010, 1999, (5) 1986, 1974, 1960, 1927, 1800. So in the last 100 years we grew 6 billion people! But in the last 200 years only 7 billion. In 1200 (approximately the time of King John) there was 360 million people in the world. Which is like taking the entire US and distributing across the globe. For reference, there were only 68 million people in Europe[2], which is about the current population of the UK[3] or about the combined population of Tokyo and Delhi (add Shanghai and Sao Paulo if you require city proper).

    So you can probably just guess through how quickly population exploded that you're going to have convergent family trees without going back very far. Honestly, I'm more surprised it takes 800 years and not less.

    [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9shzqqcfvfw

    [1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography

    [3] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by...

    [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities

  • SketchySeaBeast  12 days ago

    A relative from 800 years ago doesn't honestly seem that impressive. That's ~30 generations? That's a whole lot of people. Good luck finding a venue large enough for that family reunion.

    • lolinder  12 days ago

      Agreed—all that it really shows is that all of them but Van Buren have some form of British ancestry. Even the fact that they're all descended from a King of England isn't especially noteworthy at those kinds of time scales.

      That said, what's incredibly impressive, if true, is that someone managed to track each of their geneologies that far back along that line. That's not an easy feat. And this isn't just an internet legend: at the very least there really was a girl who really did put together a chart, and she got taken seriously enough to have it included in a Library of Congress exhibit on the Magna Carta [0].

      I'd be interested to see the actual chart she made. One possible explanation for how she was able to do this is if each of the presidents connects up to English aristocracy fairly recently, which would account for the records being intact and would be more interesting than just the fact of a shared ancestor in ~1200.

      [0] https://loc.gov/exhibits/magna-carta-muse-and-mentor/magna-c...

      4 replies →

    • Retric  12 days ago

      It’s more meaningful than you might think because the majority of people on earth probably aren’t decedents of this guy. Especially in the 1700’s when our first presidents where born.

      Essentially zero US presidents are Asian, Hispanic, etc. Pick a Native American from 30 generations ago and you don’t see this kind of family tree. It’s an expanded circle of privilege through time.

      14 replies →