It is perhaps not surprising that the battle between US President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry has turned so nasty -- it is, after all, a family affair. Both men are descendants of the same man, a native of the county of Essex in southeast England.
Their common ancestor was a member of the minor local gentry called Edmund Reade, who was born and died in Wickford without ever seeing the New World his offspring would fight over 400 years later.
However, Reade's daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, both sailed to New England with their mother, probably in the 1630s. Both had married into powerful families, Winthrop and Lake, who ultimately begot the two presidential candidates.
The common heritage makes the president and senator ninth cousins twice removed, according to Gary Boyd Roberts, a Massachusetts genealogist who researched their family backgrounds.
"They were part of the upper classes in the 1560s and they are still part of the upper classes," Roberts said, but pointed out that Kerry has more "cosmopolitan" elements in his family tree.
His father's side of the family were Jews from the Austro-Hungarian empire who converted to Catholicism and changed their name from Kohn to Kerry before emigrating to America in 1904.
Bush, the son of a former president and grandson of a senator, can trace his lineage to the Mayflower immigrants, and to some of the oldest families in the country.
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