Grim News: Scott Brown Related to Obama

Sigh. And I had such high hopes for the new Senator from Massachusetts. I guess Brown comes from the truck-driving side of the family rather than the arugula-eating wing.

It was bad enough that President Barack Obama lost his filibuster-proof margin in the U.S. Senate to a Republican. Now it turns out he also lost it to a relative.

Genealogists said Friday that the Democratic president and the newly elected senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, are 10th cousins.

The New England Historic Genealogical Society said Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and Brown's mother, Judith Ann Rugg, both descend from Richard Singletary of Haverhill, Mass.

He died in 1687 at the unheard-of, for the time, age of 102.

"I think it's a really interesting thing, where you have the separation between a Democrat and a Republican, but you have one link," said David Allen Lambert, the society genealogist who co-discovered the connection with colleague Chris Child.

Lambert said the work was aided by prior research about Obama, as well as Brown's cooperation with the society when researchers first contacted him in December.