Are Obama and Dick Cheney Related? Ancestry.com Could Help

The latest political bombshell (unconfirmed, so far as I know) is that Lynne Cheney is claiming that her husband, Vice-President Dick Cheney, is distantly related to Sen. Barack Obama.

Mrs. Cheney told MSNBC on Tuesday that it was "an amazing American story that one ancestor ... could be responsible down the family line for lives that have taken such different and varied paths." The common ancestor was Mareen Devall, who the Chicago Sun-Times said was a 17th century immigrant from France, according to Reuters.

Normally, given a chance like this, opportunism strikes. It just so happens, however, that genealogy site Ancestry.com's DNA service did not take advantage of this. So we're doing it for them.







Disclosure: I tried out the Ancestry.com service a few months ago, got hooked, and signed up. What I like about the site is that it's made for lazy genealogists like me: once I input a few key pieces of data, such as a full name and birthdate, the site instantly starts checking public databases in the background, to see if there's a match. That data includes the U.S. Census, which generally includes the names and ages of people living in a given household when the census was taken, which are extremely helpful clues to flesh out your family tree.

The service that Obama and Cheney might be interested in checking out is DNA.Ancestry.com, which allows you to submit a sample of your own DNA (a service that costs between $149 and $199) for Y-DNA (chromosomes that pass from father to son) and mtDNA tests (matching chromosomes that pass from mothers to their children).

In the coming months, DNA results will integrate with online Ancestry.com family trees. You can already add your DNA results to an existing family tree. (For privacy's sake, Ancestry.com hides all information on living members of your family, unless permitted.) A sample of what the tests might look like can be found here.

It's unclear how useful this will be, given that (thankfully) there exists no publicly accessible DNA record. It would seem that users would have to come forward and make their own DNA records accessible to determine if, say, I was actually related to the actor Gene Hackman. My understanding is that my rugged good looks are sheer coincidence.