WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has found another long-lost cousin: Scott Brown, the Republican state senator from Massachusetts who won the Senate seat long held by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.
The president and the senator-elect are 10th cousins, according to the New England Historic Genealogical Society.
Brown’s victory Jan. 19 over Democratic candidate Martha Coakley cost the Democrats their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and may have jeopardized passage of Obama’s top legislative priority — health care overhaul.
Despite the political chasm that separates the two men, however, Obama and Brown have at least one solid family link.
The New England genealogy experts report that Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and Brown’s mother, Judith Ann Rugg, both descended from Richard Singletary of Haverhill, Mass. He died in 1687 at 102.
Obama descends from Singletary’s eldest son,
Jonathan, who later changed his last name to Dunham. Brown descends
from Singletary’s other son, Nathaniel.
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