US President Barack Obama and billionaire financier Warren Buffett are reportedly very distant cousins going back to an indentured servant from 17th-century France.
Experts from what is billed as the world's largest family history website, Ancestry.com, on Tuesday said they had traced the two men's lineage to Mareen Duvall, who emigrated to Maryland from France in the 1650s.
Duvall is Obama's ninth great-grandfather and Buffett's sixth great-grandfather, says Ancestry.com, which earlier this year found Obama has German roots and in 2007 said he was distant cousin of actor Brad Pitt.
A few years after arriving as an indentured servant from France, Duvall in 1659 bought a property in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, that he later named "Middle Plantation", the genealogy research company said.
It described Obama's and Buffett's rags-to-riches common ancestor as "conservative in his political life".
Obama's ancestry was linked to that of former vice-president Dick Cheney when Obama ran for president in 2008. Cheney's wife, Lynne, said she found her husband and Obama were related through a French emigre, who turned out to be Duvall.
"Mareen Duvall had 12 children and he can have quite a number of descendants and it's hard to begin to speculate the number of people who could possibly related to Mareen Duvall in the United States," Ancestry genealogist Anathasia Tyler told AFP.
She said the relation between Obama and Buffett was discovered by chance during a research of the billionaire's ancestry.
"We didn't have any clue... We'd been working on President Obama's tree for a couple of years and then we decided to do Warren Buffett's research, and as we researched we got back a few generations and started seeing this last name Duvall.
"We continued on that and we were able to prove that there is a connection."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment