Barack Obama And Warren Buffett Are Cousins?!

According to a team of genealogists who had researched Barack Obama's family tree, the US President might just be related to influential stock market investor Warren Buffett. The discovery was accidentally made because the same group who had researched Obama's ancestry had moved on to a new project, that of putting together the family tree of Buffett, known as "The Oracle of Omaha", who has made billions of dollars investing in the stock market.


According to an announcement from Ancestry.com, both Obama and Buffett are descended from Mareen Duvall, who immigrated from France to Maryland in the 1650s. Duvall, it turns out, is the 9th-great-grandfather of Barack Obama as well as the 6th-great-grandfather of Warren Buffett. Technically that would make the men 7th cousins, 3 times removed.

The family tree shows that Barack Obama's maternal line connects to Duvall, through his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, while Buffett's father, Howard Buffett also shows descent from Duvall. Interestingly, Mareen Duvall came to America as many did in the early days of the colonies as an indentured servant. By 1659 Duvall had purchased land in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, eventually becoming a planter and a merchant, and being considered a "country gentleman."

Previously it had been found that Obama was also distantly related to actor Brad Pitt, with the two being confirmed as 9th cousins. Other interesting aspects of Obama's ancestry shows that his 6th-great-grandfather, Johann Conrad Wolfley, was from Besigheim, Wuerttemberg, Germany, and his 3rd-great-grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, landed at New York harbor in the year 1850 from his hometown of Moneygall, Ireland.

During the 2008 presidential election, the wife of then Vice President Dick Cheney stated that she had discovered that Cheney was a distant cousin of Obama, a fact she had uncovered while doing family history research on her husband's family tree.