America's12th President, My 5th Cousin: We're Related

Some time ago, I saw a friend on social media post about an app that indicated he was related to one historic figure or another. As a history nerd and genealogist, I was skeptical but intrigued enough to take a further look at Ancestry.com's app "We're Related."

Quite quickly, I began receiving notifications of possible relatives of note from yesterday and today. "Meghan Trainor is possibly your 9th Cousin," read one alert. "W.C. Fields is possible your 7th Cousin 4x Removed," said another. "Michael Jackson is possibly your 8th Cousin 1x Removed," suggested yet another notification. Ultimately, the list of figures potentially related to me, according to the app, included George Washington, Brad Paisley, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Kate Upton, Abraham Lincoln, Hillary Clinton, Dolly Parton, Walt Disney, Miley Cyrus, Marilyn Monroe, and both Presidents Bush — with my most closely-related possibilities being Franklin Pierce (4th Cousin 6x Removed), D. H. Lawrence (5th Cousin 4x Removed), Thomas Edison (5th Cousin 5x Removed), Edgar Allan Poe (5th Cousin 5x Removed), Johns Hopkins (5th Cousin 6x Removed), George Clinton (5th Cousin 7x Removed), Benjamin Franklin (5th Cousin 8x Removed), Thomas Jefferson (5th Cousin 8x Removed), and Jane Austen (5th Cousin 8x Removed).

The problem with these claims — which take your Ancestry.com family tree and compare it to other trees and data — is it makes links and leaps that are not easy to confirm. Each one would attempt to fill in gaps where I had not yet uncovered a direct ancestor's parents, and through those theoretical links came connections to these politicians, actors, writers, scientists, and musicians. In some cases, those efforts to fill gaps appear to be quite unlikely, sometimes with birthdates that seem to be before a mother's child-bearing age or when someone is quite elderly. All in all, I would try to investigate these leads and ultimately came up empty-handed each and every time. I was unable to independently verify with conviction that any of the data was correct.

Then, just a few days ago, came a new connection: Zachary Taylor. "We're Related" suggested Taylor, who went from hero during the Mexican-American War to President of the United States, is my 5th Cousin 7x Removed. The app laid out the connection, that we had mutual ancestors. I looked at the "Possible Common Ancestor," and I was excited to see it was someone already in my tree, my 12th great-grandmother, Mary Brewster. Mary, whose maiden name I do not currently know, was married to Mayflower passenger William Brewster. I am a direct descendant of theirs through their daughter Patience, a line I had been able to detail and verify previously.

Could it be? This app actually turned something up that is verifiable? It became time to investigate the lineage from Mary Brewster to Zachary Taylor, and I was pretty confident I'd be able to confirm or debunk the connection pretty quickly considering the amount of documentation out there for Mayflower descendants and, often times, for the genealogies surrounding our presidents.

According to "We're Related," Taylor was a descendant through William and Mary Brewster's daughter Fear, my 12th great aunt. The app said Mary's daughter Fear gave birth to Isaac Allerton in 1627, that he fathered Sarah Allerton in 1670, and she in turn gave birth to Elizabeth Lee in 1709, who then gave birth to Lt. Col. Richard Taylor, the father of Zachary Taylor.

I checked my family tree data and saw that I already had some of this information accounted for, reaching into a portion of the life of Sarah Allerton. I had an approximate date of birth for her, my 2nd Cousin 11x Removed. I also had a death date and that she married a man named Hancock Lee in 1690. I figured it wouldn't be too difficult to trace Sarah to her purported great-grandson. I was able to find two published texts that each made the first confirmations. The first was George Norbury Mackenzie's "Colonial Families of the United States of America, Volume II," published in 1907 by The Grafton Press. The second was also published by The Grafton Press in 1907, part of its family histories series, and compiled by Emma C. Brewster Jones to detail the Brewster family line from 1566 to 1907. The latter text includes numerous references and citations, which proved to be helpful in further corroborating the information contained therein.

As previously noted, what was already known was that Sarah Allerton had wed Hancock Lee in 1690. I was able to confirm the Virginian couple had four children: Elizabeth, Hancock, John, and Isaac. Elizabeth Lee, my 3rd Cousin 10x Removed, was the next person to focus on as "We're Related" claimed she was Taylor's paternal grandmother. Using the previously mentioned published genealogies, as well as marriage and burial records, I was quickly able to piece together the basics on Elizabeth. She was born in Virginia in 1709, marrying a man named Zachary Taylor on February 23, 1738 in Northumberland County, Virginia, on the banks of Chesapeake Bay and about 75 miles east of Fredericksburg. The two had at least one child, the only one that mattered to me in this research effort, Richard Taylor.

Richard Taylor, my 4th Cousin 9x Removed, was born in on April 3, 1744 in Orange County, Virginia, an area east of Shenandoah National Park and home to James Madison's Montpelier. After graduating from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, he was able to rise to the rank of Colonel during the American Revolution. During the war, in 1779, 35-year-old Richard married 19-year-old Sarah Dabney Strother. Among their children was Zachary Taylor, the man who would go on to become the 12th President of the United States.

Success! It was official. The "We're Related" app was right in suggesting Zachary Taylor was indeed my 5th Cousin 8x Removed.

I already knew a little bit about Zachary Taylor, but he was one of those many largely obscure antebellum presidents that were a hazy bridge from the more memorable Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln. There was now a good reason to take a deep dive. While there is a load of interesting factoids surrounding Taylor, which may lead to a future post on the man's history and death, one stood out and was a bit of a kick to the gut. Taylor's daughter Sarah had married Jefferson Davis, the man who would one day be the President of the Confederate States of America. I loathe everything about Jefferson Davis and continue to be bothered by the fact that his statue stands in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., when he led an insurrection against the United States. Sarah Knox Taylor and Jefferson Davis were wed in Kentucky on June 17, 1835, some 15 years before the Civil War. I learned Zachary Taylor was not happy about his daughter marrying Taylor, though this was primarily said to be a result of the military hero's first-hand knowledge of how difficult military life is for a family, and Davis was a military man who served under Taylor.

Sarah Knox Taylor

In a bittersweet twist, I was both saddened and pleased to learn Sarah was never the First Lady of the Confederacy. She died just three months after the wedding. The newlyweds had gone to Louisiana to visit his sister when both contracted malaria. Jefferson Davis would recover, but Sarah would not. The illness claimed her life on September 15, 1835, at the tender age of 21. Her parents were devastated by her loss, and reportedly became quite angry and bitter toward Davis for taking their daughter to Louisiana during "fever season."