All U.S. presidents bar one are directly descended from King John, signer of the Magna Carta

All presidents bar one are directly descended from a medieval English king

The king in question is the brother of Richard Lionheart, John Lackland, the king who was coerced into signing the Magna Carta, and the bad guy in the Robin Hood tales.

(By the way, the one exception is Martin van Buren.)

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Historian's Comment on Presidential Genealogy

1) Is there a particularly GOOD reason that this media outlet is reporting on the uncorroborated amateur genealogical research of a 12 year old girl?

2) This is surprising in what way, exactly? It's been roundabout 32 generations since King John and it was 23ish when the country was founded. If John had only had 2 children and each of them had only two children and so on down the list, then he'd have 4,294,967,296 living descendants today. That's a ludicrous assumption since most couples had more than two in the medieval period, although not all survived to adulthood, some went into the Church instead of marrying until as late as Elizabeth I's time and not all those who did marry had children. Then there are the "off the books" bastards who the (male) English royals loved to pop out. And of course, there's obviously an "overlap" at some point, since it stops being incest after 3rd cousinhood and it gets pretty hard NOT to have sex with anyone less than your 20th cousin or so if you date within your own nationality. (By evolutionary definition you and I are both distant cousins of every cellular lifeform on earth, although in the case of a random algae cell in the South Atlantic the relationship is something like trillionth cousins, so there is very little point in becoming FB Friends.) King John is the ancestor not just of the Royal Family, but of the entire British upper class, and a fair chunk of Europe's aristocracy as well. There was a lot more mingling of classes than either likes to admit even before the industrial revolution. (Those darned bastards and the 1-4% of births that aren't quite the children of the reputed fathers.) Basically, at this point there is no one on Earth with any English ancestry who ISN'T descended from King John, and a significant chunk of Europe as well. (My favorite by far the French political philosopher Montesquieu, who was the direct descendant and heir of Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk a sister of Edward IV and Richard III. In his will before he went off and got killed at Bosworth Richard made Elizabeth's children his heirs. Montesquieu formulated the idea of separation of powers that was integral to the US Constitution and was a strong advocate of (aristocratic) republicanism. So the irony is that the man who came up with many of the ideas that the Founding Fathers used when they separated themselves from Britain had a legitimate (but very weak) claim to the throne of England (but not Scotland).)

So the story here isn't that a 12 year old girl discovered that 42 of the 43 presidents were descended from King John, since they were all pure WASP except for Van Buren, JFK and obviously Obama, who is actually half WASP. The story here is that Van Buren, by virtue of being brought up in a residual, insular Dutch enclave left over from when New York was New Amsterdam, still managed NOT to be. (And Edward IV and Richard III spent several months hanging out in what is now Holland begging their brother-in-law the Duke of Burgundy for an army to retake England. Today there's nothing much to do in Amsterdam but pot and cheap hookers, so it wouldn't surprise me in the least if there's an undocumented connection linking old Van Buren back up to the Plantagenets that way.)

Scoop's note:

I had the same thought about Van Buren. Remember that we linked to an article in The Atlantic which made these observations:

"The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne. Virtually anyone with a European ancestor descends from English royalty."

That conclusion is based entirely on math. DNA researchers say that everyone on earth has a common ancestor who lived about 80,000 years ago.

In fact, it is Larry King.