Friday, September 2, 2016

Am I Related to Hillary Rodham Clinton?

When my grandsons were here three weekends ago, we talked about some of the famous people they know that we are related to - like Queen Elizabeth, Barack Obama, and Tom Seaver.  They then  asked me if we were related to Hillary Clinton.

I didn't know, so I went to both Geni.com and WikiTree to find out.

1)  On Geni.com, they found a relationship as 14th cousins thrice removed:




The common ancestors appear to be James Pickering, of Winderwath (1419-1497) of Yorkshire, and his wife Margaret Lascelles (1429-1495).  My descent is through their son, John Pickering, of Gretton (1450-????), and Hillary's descent is through their daughter, Margaret Pickering (1444-????).

The American immigrant ancestors in my line are John Knight (1620-1701) and Mary Pickering (1598-1676) of Charlestown, Massachusetts.  I don't know if my line back from John and Mary (Pickering) Knight is correct - the royal and noble books don't show that couple as royal descendants.
The line from the Pickerings to Hillary Rodham Clinton is a bit more tortuous - there are few dates and places given for some of her Roddam ancestors in northern England.

I judge this relationship to be a NOT LIKELY.

2)  On WikiTree, they found that I was Hillary Clinton's 18th cousin.  I quickly found Hillary (Rodham) Clinton's profile (Rodham-1) and clicked on the "Relationship to Me" link (it's under the person's name next to "My WikiTree), and the relationship chart appeared (three screens shown):




So, Hillary is my 18th cousin.  The common ancestor for this relationship is Pierre de Luxembourg (1390-1433).  My line back to Pierre de Luxembourg is in the Royal and noble lineages in several books and websites - it goes through Thomas Dudley, a Massachusetts governor in the 1600s.  Hillary's line goes back through her mother's ancestry, which claims several generations born in Detroit, Michigan in the 1700s.  The source is an LDS Pedigree Resource File.  There are 40 other common ancestors according to WikiTree, and they all seem to go through Hillary's mother and a French/Spanish connection.


I judge this relationship to be a NOT LIKELY.  

3)  I'm afraid that I will have to tell my grandchildren that I don't think we are related to Hillary (Rodham) Clinton.  It's OK, the grandsons weren't big fans of Hillary (or The Donald) anyway!
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Copyright (c) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

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1 comment:

Marty Acks said...

I have been reading your blog for a while. I truly enjoy it.

I am also an avid WikiTree user and belong to some projects there. I was curious have you posted in the G2G forum about this. If not, I would be happy to and dig into this some more and perhaps get some others to do so also. Let's get better sources or break some unsupported relationships.

I started from the oldest ancestor of Hilary's and drilled forward. The first major suspect I came across was Jehan ("John") Navarre (1555 - 1606) - http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Navarre-111. Early ancestors seemed to be notables with Wikipedia references. It does appear there are a variety of sources mentioning Jehan/John, with some different conclusions as to parentage. More to dig into here for sure.

Thanks,
Marty