President Barack Obama and billionaire investment genius Warren Buffett are distant relatives -- seventh cousins three times removed, Ancestry.com announced Monday.
Mareen Duvall, who moved from France to Maryland in the 1650s as an indentured servant, is their common link. He's Buffett's sixth great-grandfather and Obama's ninth.
Showing the kind of ambition that sent his progeny to great heights, Duvall worked his way out of servitude by 1659 and purchased a plot of land in Anne Arundel County, Md. He went on to become a planter, merchant and carpenter and was considered a country gentleman, the genealogy service said.
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President Obama and Warren Buffet share a distant cousin.
Duvall fathered six daughters and six sons before dying in the 1690s. His offspring eventually led to Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and Buffett's father, Howard Buffett, according to Reuters.
The discovery of Obama and Buffett's shared ancestor was made by accident. The same team who had researched the president's family tree stumbled upon the common name while working on Buffett's lineage.
"We recognized the name Duvall, and it made us wonder if this was a connection," Anastasia Tyler, the lead researcher on the project, told Reuters. "So we started focusing on Duvall."
Obama was born in Hawaii to Dunham, a native Kansan, and his father, Barack Obama Sr., a Kenyan. He lived in Hawaii for his childhood, except for a few years when he moved with his mother and stepfather to Indonesia. He moved to California to attend Occidental College in 1979, and then left Occidental for Columbia University in 1981.
Warren Buffett grew up in Omaha, Neb., the son of Howard and Leila Buffett. When his father was elected to Congress, he moved to Washington, D.C., to attend high school. He went on to study at Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Nebraska, and he received his master's degree in economics from Columbia University in 1951, 30 years before Obama arrived on campus.
Ancestry.com has previously linked Obama's heritage to Germany, Ireland and Brad Pitt, who they say is the president's ninth cousin. Their eighth great-grandfather, Edwin Hickman, owned land that became part of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.
