- 1. Oh, my God, you are never going to believe this but
Prince William, not content at being second in line to the throne and sending
the hearts of all those posh teenage girls aflutter, is related to George
Dubya Bush.
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- 2. So if you've always had a vague sense that all those
ruling classes types, whether they be royals or from political/aristocratic
dynasties, stick together and are all interbred, you would be right. They
are, as George might put it, all similar folk. Kind of.
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- 3. According to genealogists at the internet firm Myfamily.com
, Bush and William are 17th cousins. The link, which is pretty flimsy or
fairly remarkable depending on your opinion, relates to shared ancestry
traced back to the 15th century Northamptonshire squire Henry Spencer.
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- 4. His younger son William founded the line that eventually
produced the great wartime leader and cigar chomper Sir Winston Churchill
and Diana, Princess of Wales.
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- 5. And descendants of Henry Spencer's eldest son, John,
eventually settled in the New World in the 17th century, where they went
on to develop appetites for political power and a distrust of oil-rich
Middle East dictatorships.
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- 6. John Spencer's offspring included an Anne Marbury,
who moved from Lincolnshire to Massachusetts during the 1600s. She was
later banished for religious reasons and killed by native Americans but
a direct descendent of hers, Harriet Fay, married James Bush, the great-great
grandfather of the president.
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- 7. So now you know. It should have been obvious all along
as Mr Bush is a well known admirer of Churchill and keeps a bust of him
on his desk at the White House. Some commentators claim he borrowed some
of Sir Winston's rhetorical flourishes when addressing Congress following
the September 11 attacks but others are less sure of Bush's choice of role
model.
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- 8. Anyway, there is a great growth in people interested
in tracing their family's roots, with many logging onto the vast numbers
of genealogy websites to do so. Earlier this year, the public records office
put the 1901 Census online and quickly took it off again after more than
a million people logged on, crashing it.
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- 9. For those of you who can't be bothered staring at
charts of dead people, you could always try playing six degrees of separation,
the game where you try and link yourself via people you have met to try
and get to famous people. There is an infamous website which works out
how many degrees of separation actors are away from Kevin Bacon, who somehow
seems to sit in the middle of the movie world web like a big spider.
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- 10. There was also a play-turned movie called Six Degrees
of Separation in the 1990s where a young chancer tries to pass himself
off as the son of Sidney Poitier. But all of this seems silly to this writer
- clearly the best way to boast proximity to greatness is past life regression
under hypnosis where you can just make it all up. I was amazed to discover
I was William Shakespeare, Zorro and Luke Skywalker in my previous lives.
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/netnotes/article/0,6729,794425,00.html
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