Fact, Myth, or Lie?: ‘42 of 43 U.S. Presidents descend from King John’.

7 September 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

“Is this school-student’s allegation that 42 of 43 U.S. Presidents descended from King John, https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/n231ie/til_that_42_out_of_43_us_presidents_circa_2012/, true?”

The allegation is plausible in broad outline, but it should not be presented as an established genealogical fact that “42 out of 43 presidents descended from King John.” The important distinction is between a school student’s finding and an independently documented finding.

The Reddit headline says that “42 out of 43 US Presidents (circa 2012) share one common ancestor, King John of England.” That comes from a real project by BridgeAnne d’Avignon, who was 12 when the story first received substantial publicity. In fact, the project dates to 2009–2010, not 2012. NBC Bay Area reported it on February 16, 2010, saying that she and her grandfather spent about two years tracing presidential genealogies and concluded that every president except Martin Van Buren descended from King John.

The Library of Congress later displayed her poster in its Magna Carta: Muse and Mentor exhibition [https://archive.is/qz6MQ#selection-807.0-831.73]. But notice the LOC’s careful wording: it says that her poster “traces” the presidents to King John and then explicitly says, “According to D’Avignon’s research,” Martin Van Buren was the sole exception. In other words, the Library of Congress documents her claim; it does not certify the genealogy as correct. [This allegation by ChatGPT is false because the U.S. Library of Congress is an official agency of the U.S. Government and therefore has an obligation never to publish any scientifically undocumented allegation — such as ChatGPT concludes the d’Avignon allegation to be. The LOC is supporting an aristocratic, descent-based, and therefore intrinsically racist, high staatus to those ’42 of 43’ U.S. Presidents. Though it alleges the d’Avignon allegation shows “We Are All Related,” it does no such thing: it is explicit ONLY to those U.S. Presidents.]

There is a second problem. I cannot find a published professional genealogical study that independently checks all 42 chains of descent, generation by generation, against primary records. The popular articles generally repeat d’Avignon’s conclusion rather than provide the underlying evidentiary chains. Even recent attempts to investigate the claim find that the complete documentation necessary for independent verification isn’t publicly supplied.

At the same time, the claim is not inherently improbable. Some individual presidential descents from King John are independently well established. George Washington, for example, has a published pedigree tracing his descent from King John; such royal descents among colonial American families have been studied for much longer than d’Avignon’s project.

And there is an important mathematical point that makes the headline sound much more extraordinary than it really is. King John lived about 800 years ago, perhaps 25–30 generations before modern Americans. An individual theoretically has 1,073,741,824 ancestral positions 30 generations back—vastly more people than actually lived in the relevant populations. Consequently the same ancestors occupy enormous numbers of positions in one’s pedigree (“pedigree collapse”). Once descendants of a medieval person survived and spread widely through Britain and subsequently colonial America, that person can become an ancestor of an enormous fraction of people with the appropriate ancestry.

Indeed, one of the more perceptive comments in the Reddit discussion makes essentially this point: the striking thing isn’t necessarily presidential kinship; medieval ancestry becomes extremely widely shared after enough generations.

So I would classify the Reddit statement this way:

“A 12-year-old researcher found that 42 of the first 43 U.S. presidents were descendants of King John” — TRUE. That is accurately reporting what d’Avignon found.

“It has been established that 42 of the first 43 presidents were descendants of King John” — NOT ESTABLISHED. I cannot find the comprehensive, independently audited genealogical evidence necessary to say that.

“Therefore the presidency has largely remained within one extraordinary royal bloodline” — MISLEADING/FALSE INFERENCE. Even if every one of the 42 genealogies is correct, descent from a person living around 1200 can be shared by millions upon millions of otherwise remotely related people and would not by itself indicate an unusually close presidential family network.

There is one other correction worth making: King John did not exactly “sign” Magna Carta. Medieval English kings authenticated documents with seals; John affixed his royal seal to Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215.

If you want, I can go considerably further and try to verify the 42 presidents one by one, concentrating especially on the weakest-looking genealogical links. That would tell us whether the schoolgirl actually discovered something true, rather than merely whether newspapers reported that she did.

“Please do.”

I checked this against substantially better genealogical sources than the news stories that repeated BridgeAnne d’Avignon’s school project. The result changes my earlier assessment somewhat:

The specific claim that 42 of the 43 men who had been U.S. presidents through Barack Obama were all documented descendants of King John is NOT supported by the professional genealogical evidence I can find.

There is strong evidence that many presidents really do descend from King John, but not evidence establishing 42 of 43.

The most useful modern check is the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies (IHGS), a professional genealogy institution. Its current survey does something especially revealing: rather than repeating the “all but Van Buren” story, it identifies 27 of the 45 individuals who have served as president as having traced English royal descent. It explicitly warns that every generation has to be documented and that online family trees should not simply be accepted.

Its table identifies these presidential royal descents:

President	Documented English royal ancestry in IHGS table
George Washington	Edward I, Edward III
Thomas Jefferson	Edward I, Edward III
James Madison	Edward I
John Quincy Adams	Edward I
William Henry Harrison	Edward I
Zachary Taylor	Edward I
Franklin Pierce	King John
James Buchanan	Edward I
Rutherford B. Hayes	Edward I
Grover Cleveland	Edward I
Benjamin Harrison	Edward I
William Howard Taft	Edward I, Edward III
Woodrow Wilson	Edward I, Edward III
Calvin Coolidge	Edward I, Edward III
Herbert Hoover	Edward I, Edward III
Franklin D. Roosevelt	Edward I, Edward III
Harry Truman	Edward I, Edward III
John F. Kennedy	Edward I, Edward III
Lyndon Johnson	Edward I
Richard Nixon	Edward I, Edward III
Gerald Ford	Henry III
Jimmy Carter	Edward I
George H. W. Bush	Edward I, Edward III
Bill Clinton	Edward I
George W. Bush	Edward I, Edward III
Barack Obama	Edward I
Theodore Roosevelt	Edward I, Edward III

That is 27 presidents, not 42.

And this matters enormously for the King John question, because Edward I was King John’s great-grandson:

King John → Henry III → Edward I.

Therefore anyone genuinely descended from Edward I is necessarily descended from King John. Gerald Ford’s descent from Henry III likewise makes him a descendant of Henry III’s father, King John. Franklin Pierce is listed as having a line directly back to King John. So the IHGS material provides evidence for at least those 27 presidents being descendants of King John.

That leaves 18 presidents for whom this particular professional survey does not establish English royal descent. Among the presidents who had served by the time of d’Avignon’s project, those omissions include people such as John Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Millard Fillmore, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, James Garfield, William McKinley, Warren Harding, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.

That does not prove that those men were not descended from King John. It means that the evidence needed to make the assertion has not been established in the survey.

An especially important independent check

The New England Historic Genealogical Society, now American Ancestors, has done serious presidential genealogy for decades. Gary Boyd Roberts—one of the major specialists in American royal descents—published a detailed 1988 survey of presidents with established royal ancestry. He did not say that virtually every president possessed one. Instead, among the first 39 presidents he singled out ten presidents with New England ancestry for whom royal descents had been proved or were highly probable, and carefully distinguished proved, probable and unproved lines.

That article is particularly valuable because Roberts supplies the actual genealogical literature behind the claims: The American Genealogist, New England Historical and Genealogical Register, The Genealogist, published ancestral tables and specialist studies.

Notice how different that methodology is from:

construct a giant online family tree and follow whatever connections appear.

Roberts explicitly says, for example, that one FDR line was merely “possible, perhaps probable, but unproved,” and that one Benjamin Harrison connection awaited fuller documentation.

That is how professional genealogy handles this problem.

Obama is a useful test case

Obama’s royal ancestry is not merely part of d’Avignon’s claim. American Ancestors independently investigated it.

Roberts and Christopher Child traced Obama’s maternal ancestry through Martha Eltonhead Conway and concluded that her best royal descent is from Edward I through the Bohun, FitzAlan, Goushill, Stanley, Savage, Bold, Gerard and Eltonhead families. Since Edward I was King John’s great-grandson, that gives Obama a King John descent independently of the school project.

So some apparently surprising cases are genuine.

Even Kennedy is not an obvious counterexample

I initially thought JFK’s overwhelmingly Irish ancestry would make him one of the especially questionable cases. But the IHGS compilation actually lists eight lines from Edward I and four from Edward III for John F. Kennedy. If those pedigree lines withstand checking, Kennedy unquestionably descends from King John.

Likewise Harry Truman, who might initially seem an unlikely royal descendant, is credited with 19 Edward-I lines and seven Edward-III lines.

Thus one cannot simply infer from someone’s broadly Irish, German or ordinary-American ancestry that a medieval royal ancestor is impossible.

But here is the fatal problem with “42 of 43”

IHGS itself says:

“27 of 45 individuals who have served as U.S. President are shown with English royal descent.”

And it expressly warns:

“Not all U.S. presidents are shown in this research as having English royal ancestry.”

It also says every alleged parent-child relationship needs proof and that one unsupported link can invalidate an entire royal pedigree.

That is very hard to reconcile with treating d’Avignon’s 42-of-43 figure as an established fact.

Moreover, I have not located a publication by d’Avignon providing 42 complete, sourced pedigrees, so that each disputed parent-child connection can be examined. The contemporary reporting merely said that she and her grandfather had constructed the chart. NBC, for example, reported in 2010 that she “discovered” that all presidents except Van Buren were related to King John; it didn’t audit the genealogy.

There is another subtle problem with the wording

The original reports sometimes said the presidents were “related to” King John, while subsequent internet retellings converted that into “descended from” King John.

Those are not equivalent.

Someone can be related to King John through a collateral family connection without being his descendant. Genealogy sites can readily produce a “relationship” between two people through spouses, siblings and cousins that is not ancestral descent.

So any chart used to prove the Reddit headline must specifically show

King John → child → child → … → president

without ever switching to a sibling, spouse, uncle or collateral cousin.

That is a substantially higher evidentiary bar.

My resulting verdict

I would now rate the Reddit statement:

“42 out of 43 U.S. presidents circa 2012 share King John as an ancestor” — UNPROVEN, and therefore should NOT be stated as fact.

What we can say much more securely is:

“A surprisingly large number of U.S. presidents have documented descent from King John. A current professional genealogical compilation identifies English royal descent for 27 of the 45 individuals who have served as president; because their identified royal ancestors—principally Edward I and Edward III—descended from King John, these 27 also descend from King John.”

And that result actually makes the d’Avignon story more interesting. She may have been right about additional presidents for whom the professional table simply hasn’t established a royal pedigree—but the leap from 27 documented cases to 42 is precisely where the evidence needs to be produced.

So I would not call the schoolgirl a liar or say her finding has been disproved. I would say that the press converted an impressive school genealogy project into a purportedly established historical fact without the necessary independent genealogical verification.

If your purpose is fact-checking that Reddit item, the shortest defensible judgment is therefore:

UNPROVEN — not TRUE. At least 27 presidential King-John descents have substantial genealogical support, but I find no professionally documented demonstration of the claimed 42 out of 43.

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MY COMMENTS:

My additional check of this on (and questions to) Google AI produced at its end: “The d’Avignon chart is a map of historical paperwork, not a map of shared DNA. If any step of those 500,000 documents contained a hidden historical affair [such as if the wife had had a child who was actually from an affair] or a recording error, the biological chain breaks. DNA testing is highly effective at destroying or confirming recent generations, but it remains entirely blind to a 12th-century king [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]” because that is too far back. It further explained that “if a modern president took a standard DNA test, it would show zero genetic connection to King John, even if the paper-trail family tree is 100% historically accurate.[1]” ChatGPT disagreed: “d’Avignon produced a genealogical finding based on documentary descent, not a genetic finding. DNA cannot presently provide an independent test of the entire King-John-to-president chain. The reliability of each claimed descent consequently depends upon the quality of the documentary evidence for every link.” However, even ChatGPT agreed that d’Avignon failed to publish such documentation. Consequently, by both AIs: the many social media and the few local ‘news’ media (such as the Santa Cruz Sentinel) that have published the d’Avignon ‘findings’, were spreading a myth, no “finding.” No way yet exists to know whether it was true. Of course even the national ‘news’-media do that (spread myths), but they have a national propaganda objective (supporting the national Government’s legitimacy), and can therefore exercise skepticism, or not report at all, ‘news’ items which are irrelevant to that propaganda-objective of regime-support. Consequently, the d’Avignon ‘findings’ have not, thus far, been reported in national ‘news’-media. But since the center of propaganda is the regime itself, and the Library of Congress is a branch of it: for the LOC to publish d’Avignon’s pro-aristocratic and implicitly racist ‘findings ‘about ’42 of 43 U.S. Presidents’ demonstrates the regime’s racism, which is appropriate for any racist-fascist-supremacist regime to do — it’s the way its propaganda is done (by implication instead of direct statement). And this comes from the regime’s center, not merely from its ‘news’-media.

An interesting side-note is that whereas on August 29th, Trump rated himself as the only one of the 34 U.S. Presidents he ranked who is in his “The Greatest” category, and he failed to mention (much less to rate) any of the 9 that he didn’t list; today, Trump redid his list, and this time, shows himself as being “The Greatest” of all 43 U.S. Presidents. Now that he knows of those other 9, he still considers himself to be “The Greatest.”

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.