November 1, 2007
The Melting Pot—2007 Version Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:00 AM EST Some enterprising genealogist recently unearthed the fact that Barack Obama is the ninth great-grandson of a Maryland immigrant named Mareen Duvall. Duvall, a French Huguenot, was a classic American success story. Arriving in Maryland in the 1650s as an indentured servant, by the time of his death in 1694 he was one of the largest landowners in Anne Arundel County. He had 12 children, so he has a vast descendancy. There is even something called the Society of Mareen Duvall Descendants. One of those descendants turns out to be . . . Vice President Dick Cheney, who is Senator Obama’s ninth cousin once removed. Also related to Senator Obama through Mareen Duvall are the Duchess of Windsor, Harry Truman (twice, thanks to a cousin-cousin marriage some generations back), and the actor Robert Duvall. Oh, and me too. Mareen Duvall is my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, making me a ninth cousin of the Vice President and a ninth cousin once removed of the senator. It is amazing how genealogically interconnected Americans are. Of the 42 men who have been President, only 15 have no known relationships to other Presidents. Franklin Roosevelt was related to no fewer than 16 other Presidents, the two Bushes to 15, Taft and Coolidge to 14. Part of the reason for that is that Roosevelt, the Bushes, Taft, and Coolidge have many New England ancestors and thus are descended from the mere 25,000 or so immigrants who came in the Great Migration from 1620, when the Mayflower arrived, and 1642, when the English Civil War broke out. Immigration to New England largely stopped after that and so the descendants of the 25,000 intermarried over and over until the nineteenth century, when the “New England diaspora” began and new immigrants, such as the Irish and Portuguese, began coming to New England.
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