Has anyone proven/disproven the meme about King John Plantagenets connection to nearly all US Presidents?

Question

There is a meme going around the internet recently about a young girl who has proven the lineage of all but one US president to King John Plantagenet. Has anyone on WikiTree been able to prove or disprove this?

Answer 1

I created this for you.  You will have to invest the time to check each one out.  However, it calculates the relationship of King John to each of the US Presidents.  These are straight line connections based on WikiTree profiles.

US Presidential Relationships to King John Plantagenet

Comments

I have tracked each presidents relationship to each president here on wikitree to each other and to George Washington using the relationship finder. I am not saying the relationship finder is an absolute true tool. But the results are pretty close to what this little girl is saying. It doesn't surprise me. Look at how many of us today on wikitree are related thru 1600 ancestors who came to America. And to Royalty. In America today being relateted to Royalty distantly ,  is common. I don't think the presidents being related to each other is any different than all us'uns being cousin s on wikitree. Think about it.   They all just have the same job.  Civil War Generals , alot of them are related to Presidents.  Alot of us are related to Presidents. I don't think it's that unusual or out there.  I know that at this time my line can't be documented with certainty past a hundred years from either of my parents.  It might never be.

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Good way of finding bad gateways.  I looked at about 20 lines and Jefferson was the only one of those with a recognised gateway in the line shown.

The RF has a natural preference for bad lines and they have to be snipped before it'll show the good ones.

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This means that someone has recreated or reconnected some bad gateways....we worked this issue back in 2014 on the US Presidents project...or maybe someone found a new connect...

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Perhaps even the early ones all had valid lines through post-1700 immigrants.

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Robin is there some place that shows the work the US Presidents Project did on this. When you talk of bad gateways what is meant.  RJ what does it mean " the RF has a preference for bad lines " .  I never but much trust in relationships to me that the RF comes up with because so much of my research into descendants of people from the 1600s down is so variable from person to person as to which source they chose over another. The RF is often a pointer of sorts. It often leads to well documented profiles and I can follow the sources listed on them.

Answer 2

I ran across a newspaper article in The Daily Mail (4 August 2012) that talks about it in more detail.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2183858/All-presidents-bar-directly-descended-medieval-English-king.html

Another article made a good point

"Color me skeptical about this one, and not just because it appears in The Daily Mail (the story is also covered by a local California television station). It’s always strange to me when these types of genealogy studies find connections between American Presidents and royalty. Is it possible? Certainly it is, but how exactly is someone like Dwight Eisenhower, whose parents were both of German ancestry, related to a King born in England who reigned some 800 years before Ike was born? The same could be said of the Irish-rooted Jack Kennedy, as well as people like Abraham Lincoln. I’d have to see actual genealogists verify this before believing it."

Wonder if the US President Project folks here have tackled that question.

Comments

Everybody has 2 parents, 4 grandparents etc.  Genealogists soon stop talking about "German ancestry" etc.  You only need one marriage to branch off in a whole different direction.

JFK's mother was a Fitzgerald.  The line doesn't seem to have been traced, but of course it'll go back to the Anglo-Irish pool which included the Burkes, Butlers etc.  You'll find English wives in there.

And there are two sorts of Kennedys in Ireland - the native Irish Kennedys and the descendants of immigrant Scottish Kennedys.  Apparently JFK's lot are the Scottish sort, and the Scottish nobility was also well supplied with English blue blood.

What's strange is how people talk as if their ancestry is defined by male lines.

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In recent history there is a very close tie between English , German and European Royalty.

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Most European Royal families are related to each other. Royals married Royals and historically families were united in marriage to protect lineages and to join families (and armies and lands) and to stop wars. There is absolutely no surprise that German immigrants could be related to British royalty 800 years back since there were many intermarriages between the families in that time and you only need 1.

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Everybody has two parents and usually four grandparents, possibly only three, and no fewer than two.  This is because siblings and half siblings do sometimes mate.  A similar treatment is true at the great-grandparent level for cousins.  One should quickly see that ancestry is not a tree at all rather a directed acyclic graph.

Answer 3

It's marketing.  They merchandize.

It was her grandfather who did the genealogy.  But he's no Douglas Richardson.  He didn't do it from primary sources.  He only looked stuff up in old books.  He hasn't got anything new, though he's probably got a few connections that are discredited.

But most Presidents are descended from King John.

Answer 4

The first question you have to ask is: "what do they mean by 'related'?"  If they mean "descended from" I'm pretty sure it's not true that all the presidents except for Van Buren are descended from King John.  However, if they cast the relationship net broader and include cousin relationships and/or marriages, then I believe it is probably true.  I bet someone who is diligent and has some time on their hands could make those connections.

Comments

Burke did a book in the 19th century and the whole subject is done to death.  Every candidate gets the treatment.  The problem is that too many people have too much royal ancestry - it's easy to find claimed connections, but the bad ones have to be weeded out.

This is also the issue with WikiTree's relationship finder.  If you're looking for royals, it'll find you far more connections than actually exist.  The problem is not to create lines but to dismantle them.

Answer 5

My guess is that she used wikitree to find the connections. Last I checked using Relationship Finder, I was related to all of them except Martin Van Buren, William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, and Ronald Reagan.

Answer 6

How about all Presidents being related to George Washington? 

US Presidential Relationships to George Washington

For those that like this stuff...

Comments

If all Presidents are related to George Washington , If they are  , then they would most likely be related to Plantagenets. Alot of us on wikitree are. Potentially.

Answer 7

Apparently still Unproven...

http://humphrysfamilytree.com/famous.unproved.html

Comments

more here from the same site.

http://humphrysfamilytree.com/famous.descents.html#presidents