Are all the US Presidents related?

hi this is matt baker this coming monday is presidents day in the u. s and therefore i thought it would be a good time to address the question are all the us presidents related you see back in 2009 a young girl by the name of bridgeann davinyo made the news for having discovered that every single us president except one is the direct descendant of king john of england ever since then whenever people come across this fact they assume that something extraordinary must be at work some people even start wondering about whether there really are secret societies that control the world or ancient bloodlines that continue to hold on to power well here's the thing the answer to the question are all the us presidents related is in fact yes however the problem is that we should actually be asking a different question what we should be asking is are all the us presidents more closely related to each other than any other random group of natural born americans would be because the answer to that question is no for example two weeks ago on this channel i demonstrated how mr beat and i are actually 11th cousins even though he's an american and i'm a canadian this is because if we go back far enough everyone in the world is related to each other somehow and you usually don't have to go back as far as you might think today's video is actually a three-part collaboration between genie vlogger mr beat and useful charts in genie vlogger's video he's going to explain why it is that most of us are more closely related than you think in mr beat's video he's going to talk about some of the us presidents who are in fact quite closely related and in this video well i of course am going to show you a family tree chart one that includes 20 us presidents and i'm going to show you the closest connections that i could find between those 20. [Music] [Music] okay i'm going to start off with martin van buren the eighth president of the united states remember how bridge and davino's chart included every president except one well some people assume that that one missing person was obama but it was actually martin van buren van buren was the first person of dutch descent as opposed to british descent to serve as president but just because he's not a descendant of king john of england it does not mean that he's not related to other presidents this is because most of the later presidents have mixed ancestry just like most americans today for example the two roosevelts had dutch british and french ancestors you can see here that martin van buren had a third cousin who was the great grandmother of teddy roosevelt the 26th u.

s president this means that teddy roosevelt actually has a closer blood relationship to van buren than he does to franklin roosevelt of course the two roosevelts are also related but not as closely as you might think you have to go back six generations to find the roosevelt ancestor that teddy and franklin share in common that man was nicholas roosevelt teddy descends from his son johannes whereas franklin descends from his son jacob this makes the two roosevelt president's fifth cousins another thing you might not have been aware of is that eleanor roosevelt the wife of franklin roosevelt was also a roosevelt not just by marriage but by birth she was actually teddy roosevelt's knees so the two presidents actually share a closer relationship through marriage than they do through blood franklin roosevelt was the 32nd president and he is often remembered by his initials fdr well the d stands for delano which was his mother's maiden name the delano family descends from a man named philip de la noe who arrived in new england just one year after the mayflower and he's actually the ancestor of three american presidents in addition to fdr he's also the direct ancestor of ulysses grant the 18th president and calvin coolidge the 30th president so that makes fdr and ulysses grant fourth cousins once removed and fdr in coolidge sixth cousins twice removed now before we go on a lot of people get confused by the whole once removed twice removed terminology so let me quickly explain if two people share the same parents they are siblings if they both have a kid those kids are first cousins the next generation down would be second cousins and then third cousins and so on however when we're comparing the relationship between two people in different generations we use the term removed to refer to how big the difference is so for example if we want to describe the relationship between this person and this person we'd say that they are first cousins once removed if you kept going down you'd get twice removed three times removed and so forth okay so back to the presidents you can see here that fdr had a great great grandmother named elizabeth cushman and she was the direct descendant of isaac allerton one of the 51 surviving passengers of the mayflower the mayflower being the first english boat to arrive in what would become new england that was way back in the year 1620. several u. s presidents are mayflower descendants as are many americans in general for example zachary taylor was also a descendant of isaac allerton whereas the two bushes descend from mayflower passenger john howland fdr actually descends from a second mayflower passenger richard warren as did ulysses grant and coolidge and the two atoms descend from mayflower passenger john alden speaking of the bushes and the atoms these are the only two cases of father-son presidents john adams who was president just after george washington was one of the 56 men who signed the declaration of independence at the time he signed it his son john quincy adams was only eight years old but several decades later john quincy would go on to serve as the country's sixth president the bushes of course both served as president much more recently george h.

w bush being the 41st president and his son george w bush being the 43rd in addition to the two sets of father-son presidents there was also a case of grandfather grandson presidents that was william harrison the 9th president and benjamin harrison the 23rd president william harrison is notable in that he died a mere 31 days after his inauguration making his presidency the shortest of all time let's now look at james madison the fourth president james polk the 11th president and zachary taylor the 12th president other than the presidents who share a last name these three are the most closely related this is because they all descend from this man here james taylor jr this makes taylor and madison second cousins and polk their second cousin once removed i'd also like to point out that taylor's daughter sarah was the first wife of jefferson davis who after sarah's death went on to serve as the first and only president of the confederate states of america the group of breakaway states in the south that ended up losing the civil war the taylor family also connects to two additional presidents james taylor jr had a brother named john if we follow his line six generations down we come to first lady claudia taylor better known as lady bird johnson wife of the 36th president lyndon b johnson but the taylors also have a connection to one of the most famous presidents of all time abraham lincoln the 16th president if we go up two generations from james taylor jr we get to the family patriarch john taylor who was one of the earliest settlers in virginia if we follow his son thomas's line down six generations we come to nancy hanks the mother of abraham lincoln so that's lincoln's maternal side on his father's side abraham lincoln is related to the harrisons you can see here that the harrison family starts with two brothers thomas and benjamin both of whom were like john taylor early settlers in virginia lincoln descends from thomas whereas the two harrison presidents descend from benjamin i'd also like to point out william harrison's father benjamin harris v he too is an important figure in u. s history being that he was one of the signers of the declaration of independence and hence a founding father his mother was anne carter and through her the harrisons are connected to two more famous virginia families the carters and the washingtons ann carter and jimmy carter are in fact related but the connection is pretty distant so i haven't shown it on the chart instead i've shown her connection to the washingtons ann carter's great great grandmother was ann washington the sister of lawrence washington both ann washington's daughter phyllis and lawrence washington's son john immigrated to virginia john was the great grandfather of the very first president of the united states george washington okay there's a few more connections i want to show you earlier i mentioned lyndon johnson well lyndon johnson is actually obama's closest presidential relative both of them descend from a revolutionary soldier named philip ament making them fourth cousins three times removed finally there's richard nixon he descends from henry howland the brother of mayflower passenger john howland but the president he's most connected to is actually by marriage not by blood in 1968 just after he was elected the 37th president his daughter julie married david eisenhower the grandson of the 34th president dwight eisenhower ever hear of a place called camp david it's a retreat near washington that u. s presidents have been using since the 1930s well it received its current name from president eisenhower who in 1953 decided to change the name to camp david to honor both his father and his grandson both of whom were named david at the time the younger david was only five years old okay so that was a look at some of the closest genealogical connections between u.