Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Obama, Palin, Limbaugh, Reid, Coulter, oh my...

I watched the brief segment on ABC's Good Morning, America today that featured Anastasia Tyler from Ancestry.com and Leslie Albrecht Huber, author of The Journey Takers.  My hope was that the segment would be about Leslie's book, or about immigration to America, but no...it was about ... wait for it ... strange political bedfellows!  Anastasia had about 20 seconds, Leslie had about ten...but they made genealogy research look good on TV! 

The segment was about the latest article about President Obama's relationships, this time to Sarah Palin and to Rush Limbaugh.  Obama and Palin are 10th cousins through a common ancestor named John Smith, a pastor and early settler in 17th-century Massachusetts. Obama is related to Smith through his mother, as is Palin.  Rush Limbaugh, is also a 10th cousin of the president — one time removed — through a common ancestor named Richmond Terrell, who was a large landowner in Virginia in the 17th century.  Rush Limbaugh led off his program this morning highlighting his brief mention in the article, and denigrating "some genealogy company").

The article also noted that Palin is distant cousins with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and conservative author and pundit Ann Coulter, through John Lathrop, who was exiled to the United States from England for being a pastor of an illegal independent church.

You can see outlines of some of these ancestries on William Addams Reitwiesner's website, http://www.wargs.com/:
 
Barack Obama
 
Sarah Palin
 
Rush Limbaugh - I don't see Rush's relationship to Richmond Terrell here - Ancestry.com must have extended his ancestry back.
 
Ann Coulter - I don't see Ann's relationship to John Lathrop here - Ancestry.com must have extended her ancestry back to find it.
 
I hope that Ancestry.com will publish more about the ancestral lines than just the statements they've made in the news article. 
 
Ancestry.com has a feature in the One World Tree database to find relationships of a specific person in a tree to famous people.  Unfortunately, new trees cannot be added to One world Tree, and my own tree is not there, although parts of it are there.  I don't see a similar capability in Ancestry Member Trees, but it would be nice to have!
 
For the record, I am related to Barach Obama (see Yep, Barack Obama is my cousin!), to Sarah Palin (see Sarah Palin is my cousin too!) and Mitt Romney (see Cousinhood to Mitt Romney), not to mention George W. Bush (hmmm, I haven't posted this yet - cool, some blog fodder!).

Updated 7 PM: corrected Mr. R's first name, thanks Martin.  Brain fart, I fear.  Never know when they pop out... the perils of blogging without a content editor!

4 comments:

Geolover said...

Randy, you said "Ancestry.com has a feature in the One World Tree database to find relationships of a specific person in a tree to famous people. Unfortunately, new trees cannot be added to One world Tree, and my own tree is not there, although parts of it are there. I don't see a similar capability in Ancestry Member Trees, but it would be nice to have!"

The Famous Relative Finder widget in OneWorldTree is quite unreliable because most trees copied into OWT (like most trees on the web) are junk. The OWT widget works only within OWT.

The Ancestry Member Trees now have a way to calculate relationships within a given tree. Unless you copy the probably-junk material in another person's tree into your own, back to the desired famous person, the new MemberTrees calculator can't show you what your relationship might be.

If you give further thought to how exactly a "famous relative finder" might work, and realize that you'd have to have your tree integrated with a construct containing a bunch of famous persons, do you ~really~ want this? Imagine half a million persons adding their purported direct lineage into such a new combined tree in order to calculate their relationships with some famous person. OWT all over again, but without the saved server-space of the mergers done by the OWT software.

The AncestryInsider blogger posted a try in OWT here:

http://ancestryinsider.blogspot.com/2010/09/relative-finder-ancestrycom-style.html

Martin said...

It's William Addams Reitweisner not Richard.

I actually despise Ancestry.com and certainly during the 2008 Megan Smolenyak, because they stole the thunder of Gary Boyd Roberts. Gary has been doing presidential genealogy since the 1970s. Obama and Bush were researched by him and his team. They should credit, which they never do. Palin was researched by Robert Battle at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~battle/palin.htm. I find these self serving news releases by Ancestry obnoxious to say the least.

As Aunt Em might say "just because they own half the county doesn't mean they have power over the rest of us."

Tamura Jones said...

I don't know whether Ancestry.com does it own research. I just keep tweeting that they should provide sources for their claims.
Even though this connection seems likely, it simply has become hard to believe Ancestry PR since they've published utter nonsense such as their Dracula Claim.

Gary Boyd Roberts does serious research and Good Morning America should have asked him to verify Ancestry.com's claims.

Lisa Louise Cooke said...

Spending time with Leslie would have been a better use of their time in the segment. She's a joy to talk with and you can hear my extended itnerview with her about The Journey Takers in the latest episode of The Genealogy Gems Podcast #98 at http://www.genealogygems.com