I’m guessing there is a backlog of Christmas gifts due
| Barack Obama makes much of his varied heritage. His father was from Kenya, his mother from Kansas. But there is one element of his family history that has remained obscure: his eighth cousin is Dick Cheney. |
| The revelation that the man promising a new style of politics is related to a vice-president credited with an unprecedented attempt to consolidate the power of old politics was made by Mr Cheney’s wife. |
Lynne Cheney told an interviewer that she discovered the connection between her husband and the candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination while researching a memoir of growing up in Wyoming, entitled Blue Skies, No Fences, although she did not include this fact in her memoir. She said that the two were both descended from a man who moved to Wyoming from Maryland. |
| Mr Obama was descended from Mareen Duvall, a French Huguenot. His son married the granddaughter of one Richard Cheney, Susannah, who arrived in Maryland from England in the late 1650s. |
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