You will probably read a dozen more stories like this before the election, but there is one new article about related politicians in the news recently. Lynne Cheney has been researching her husband's genealogy for her new book and discovered that Dick Cheney and Barack Obama have at least one thing in common: an ancestor.
You can read the full story at http://www.thesequitur.com/content/view/1690/43/.
Comment: If I read one more story about two politicians being related, I think I'll scream. Let's face it, everyone is related to everyone.
Each person has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and so forth in a mathematical progression. If you go back two or three hundred years you have thousands of ancestors. Go back a thousand years and you have a theoretical billion ancestors or so. (It's theoretical because that's more people than ever lived on the face of the earth. Obviously, you have multiple lines of descent from many of these people.)
Everyone else has the same number of theoretical ancestors, including all the well-known personalities. If your ancestors have been in this country for 200 or 300 years and someone else's ancestors have done the same, there is a very strong likelihood that the two of you share at least a few ancestors. If you could trace your ancestry back a few thousand years, you'd probably find that you are related to everyone else on the face of the earth.
OK, so Cheney and Obama are related. So are you and so am I. I'd bet that George W. Bush is even related to Osama bin Laden if we could go back far enough in history. Ho-hum. Some reporter had a slow news day.
Now, do you think Cheney and Obama will invite us to their family reunion?
