[geolarson2]

Way back in my undergrad days, after I'd switched from psych to anthro to history, I found myself in a class on Medieval Britain. While there, I found myself analyzing the motives of the nobles & Crown, and that led me to look at familial ties. Anyway, long story short the whole thing became a nice little hobby of mine that branched out to the rest of Europe and into America. So this morning I'm just scrolling through my index and looking at the various names and such, and it dawned on me--Barack Hussein Obama and Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, President of the United States and Mayor of London respectively, have some interesting parallels in their families. Both have Muslim ancestors, while neither is a Muslim (Obama's grandfather converted to Islam from I think it was the Catholic Church, and Johnson's grandfather converted from Islam to the Anglican Church if I have it right--Obama, of course, was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents who were Methodists). Both are of mixed-race--Obama's father was Kenyan, Johnson's great-grandfather was a Turk (his son, Boris's grandfather, changed the family name from Kemal to Johnson). Both also have their ties to slavery. Obama's mother's family once owned slaves, while Boris's great-great-grandmother was a slave, the difference is that Obama's family's slaves were of African origin, while Johnson's great-great-grandma was Caucasian (and here I don't mean she was white, although she was, I mean that she apparently came from the Caucasus). And while obviously on his mother's side Barack has American ancestry, including a few ancestors from New England, Johnson does, too--his maternal great-grandmother was born Helen Tracy Porter in Towanda PA, while her family came to PA from Connecticut & Massachusetts. It just struck me this morning that here you have two prominent politicians with some interesting titbits of trivia in their family trees. Oh, and by the way, they're distantly related to each other--both are at the very least descended from Edward I of England (Obama through his immigrant ancestors, Edward FitzRandolph of MA & Eltonhead Conway Thacker of VA; Johnson through Auguste Guelph, sister of King George III, who married King Friedrich I of Wuerttemburg).