Distant Relations: Taylor Swift Inspired Me To Research My Literary Lineage
(Creative Nonfiction) Ties include Edna St. Vincent Millay, Luisa May Alcott, and—you guessed it—Emily Dickinson.
Taylor Swift is Emily Dickinson’s 6th cousin, three times removed. I am Emily Dickinson’s 6th cousin, six times removed. Wait, does that mean I am related to Taylor Swift? Are Taylor Swift and I cousins?
When I read The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson as a child, I felt I had found a kindred spirit. I wondered if I might be related to Emily Dickinson too. The gene pool in colonial America was pretty small, so maybe a lot of Americans are related to Emily Dickinson.
I recognize it is a great privilege to have access to ancestral records. My grandma has worked for years to research our genealogy, and thanks to her I have an account on Family Search, a free genealogy website created and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There is no religious affiliation required to use the website. Once you have an account, you can access Relative Finder and explore your relationships. Under “Group Filters” you can choose various categories such as U.S. Presidents, Movie Stars, and Authors and Poets.
I toggled on the Authors and Poets filter and there she was, right near the top of the list: Emily Dickinson. What are the odds? I immediately typed “Statistically, how many people in the United States are related to Emily Dickinson?” into the internet. I was not able to find that information. Given the current state of search engine algorithms, I believe I’d have better luck asking a librarian.
Through Relative Finder, I was able to look more closely at my relationship to Dickinson and found we share thirteen common ancestors. Surely one of them would be Joseph Gillette, Taylor Swift’s 9th great-grandfather. Right? I was able to locate someone named Joseph Gillette Jr. on Relative Finder. His birthdate matched the birthdate on Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson’s shared lineage, but he is not one of the thirteen ancestors I share with Dickinson.
According to Relative Finder, I don’t share any ancestry with Taylor Swift and I’m more closely related to Noah Webster and Henry David Thoreau than I am to Emily Dickinson. Several of my heroes including John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, and Luisa May Alcott are also on the list of literary cousins. I have no idea how common it is to be distantly related to notable people. Based on the volume of my results, I’d guess it’s pretty common.
Many of the names I don’t know but probably should, and I’m excited to scour the library for their work. I just put The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay on hold.
I’m inspired to have discovered family ties, however distant, to so many wonderful writers. Who knows, maybe you and I are related. If you go back far enough, all of humanity shares a common ancestor. I guess that means we are all definitely, though extremely distantly, related to Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson.
And Groucho Marx!!