Found this on a British Genealogical list, and thought some of you folks might enjoy this "timely" information. Tom Lundeen -------------------------------------------------------------- Saturday, October 21, 2000 Bush, Gore both come from royal ancestors By Murray Campbell, Toronto Globe and Mail Is it six degrees of separation or simply a massive case of inbreeding? Burke's Peerage, the British firm that tracks blue bloods around the world, reports that U.S. presidential candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore are both descended from royalty. Worse, from the point of view of political strategists, the two men are distant cousins. "It is now clear that Gore and Bush have an unusually large number of royal and noble descents," said Harold Brooks-Baker, the company's publishing director. "In point of fact, never in the history of the United States have two presidential candidates been as well endowed with royal alliances." Bush's aristocratic background is no surprise. Through his mother and father, a former U.S. president, the Republican candidate is connected to many European monarchies and can trace his family back to a sister of Henry VIII. George W. Bush may be a good ol' boy from backwater Texas who habitually drops his g's, but he is, in fact, a 13th cousin of the Queen. Gore's links with Britain's most dysfunctional family are harder to find. Burke's Peerage was convinced until recently that the Democratic nominee was as common as a gun rack on a Tennessee pickup. In the past few weeks, however, researchers have determined that Gore is descended from Edward I, who ascended the throne in 1272, and that as further records are discovered, "he is looking more royal every day," Brooks-Baker said. If that weren't bad news enough for a candidate looking to establish that he's just a regular guy, there is worse: Gore is apparently also a cousin of Richard Nixon, the Republican who resigned the presidency in disgrace in 1974. Burke's Peerage, whose roots are in a genealogical directory published in 1826 by Irishman John Burke, is in the business of locating and researching titles for clients. It publishes volumes dealing with the landed gentry and offers its clients a Mastercard credit card carrying its name. The firm has also documented the lineage of all 42 U.S. presidents and has concluded that 35 of them have some sort of royal connection and that U.S. presidents are eight times as likely to have a drop of British royal blood as the people casting the ballots. George Washington, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan all were said to have a tinge of blue blood. This may not play well with Americans who revere their country's meritocratic ideals, but it comes as no surprise to Brooks-Baker. "You have to realize how small the world was at the time of the American Revolution," he said in an interview. He noted that 18th-century England had a population of just 3 million and that the chance of a large proportion of those people being related is very high. Scripps Howard News Service