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Obama and Gen. Robert E. Lee: fifth cousins eight times removed?
Obama and James Madison: third cousins nine times removed?
A genealogical scholar says presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is a distant relative of both Robert E. Lee and President James Madison. |
BY FRANK DELANO
In addition to his father's village in Africa, Barack Obama may be able to add Montpelier and Stratford Hall to his list of ancestral homes.
According to a venerable genealogical society, the Illinois senator and presumptive Democratic nominee for president is a distant cousin of both President James Madison, who was born in King George County in 1751, and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, who was born in 1807 at Stratford in Westmoreland County.
"I always thought of Obama as this strange, exotic person. But he could walk in here tomorrow just like anybody else and start looking for his ancestors in Westmoreland County," said Darlene Tallent, a researcher and historian at the county museum in Montross.
A scholar of the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Bos-ton traced lots of Obama's maternal ancestors. The society announced earlier this year that Gary Boyd Roberts found that Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham of Kansas, had many ties to old families in Virginia and other Colonies.
One of those lines goes back to a 17th-century Englishman named Richard Eltonhead, the ancestor shared by Obama, Madison and Lee. Two of Eltonhead's daughters married Northern Neck tobacco planters named Conway and Corbin, Roberts reported.
James Madison's mother was a Conway. He was born at his grandparents' place at Port Conway on the Rappahannock River across from Port Royal. Consequently, Obama and James Madison are third cousins nine times removed, Roberts wrote.
The Corbin connection makes Obama and Lee fifth cousins eight times removed, Roberts discovered. It also ties him to Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee, two Stratford bro-thers who signed the Declaration of Independence.
"We can't validate it one way or the other," an official of the Society of Lees of Virginia said of Roberts' findings. The official did not wish to be named.
Frederick Madison Smith, president of The National Society of the Madison Family Descendants, said Roberts' claims are "without merit as now presented." Smith criticized a lack of genealogical documentation in Roberts' work.
"In the absence of a proved genealogy, fully documented for each generation and individual claimed, we cannot consider these celebrity claims to be either 'authoritative' or valid, Smith wrote in an e-mail.
Tallent said some patrons of the Westmoreland County Museum have been surprised when told of Obama's possible local connection.
"People either don't believe it or they think it's wrong," she said. "But one visitor said, 'So Obama's just an old Westmoreland County boy after all.'"
"I think it's neat," she said. "Here in the Northern Neck, where we know how interconnected everybody is, it's not as surprising to us as it is to some other people."
Obama has more famous kin than John McCain, the Boston genealogist found. McCain, the likely GOP nominee for president, is sixth cousin to first lady Laura Bush.
But Obama is also related to both her husband and her father-in-law, as well as to Presidents Truman, Johnson and Ford, according to Roberts.
With his widespread ancestry in Colonial America, Obama "is certainly related to millions of contemporary Americans--perhaps even a significant percentage of the population," Roberts wrote.
Roberts said Obama's African ancestry can be traced for several generations.
The village where Barack Obama Sr. was born is about 200 miles from Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge, where anthropologists have discovered fossil remains of human ancestors dating back 2.5 million years.
Therefore, on his father's side, Obama might be a cousin to everybody on Earth.
Frank Delano: 804/333-3834
Email: fpdelano@gmail.com
