MyHeritage Reveals Boris Johnson is Related to EU President
MyHeritage announced that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is distantly related to the newly elected President of the European Union, Dr. Ursula von der Leyen. This revelation could make Brexit appear to include a family feud. That said, it seems unlikely that these two would have to share a Christmas dinner together.
MyHeritage researchers discovered this information when they used Geni.com. The connection between Boris Johnson and Dr. Ursula von der Leyen goes back to a marriage between John and Margaret de Beauchamp in the 1400s. This makes Boris Johnson and Dr. Ursula von der Leyden 16th cousins.
John de Beauchamp was born in 1409. He is the son of Sir William Beauchamp and Catherine Usflete. He married Margaret Beauchamp (Ferrars), who was born in 1413, and was the daughter of Sir Edmund Ferrars. They married somewhere around 1434. John died in 1475, and Margaret died in 1487.
The UK Prime Minister’s full name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. His father’s ancestry includes Turkish and European origins. Boris Johnson is also 5th cousins twice removed with Queen Elizabeth II.
Boris Johnson’s maternal great-grandmother was a Russian Jewish immigrant to the United States. This gave him dual U.K. and U.S. citizenship, until he renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2016.
Boris Johnson was born in New York when his parents worked there, and he lived in the U.S. until he was five years old. It appears the reasons Boris Johnson renounced his U.S. citizenship was to avoid “ambiguous loyalties”, and also to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
Dr. Ursula von der Leyen became President of the European Commission on December 1, 2019. She is descended from natives of Hanover and Bremen in Germany, but also has an American great-grandmother who is of British, French, Italian, and Baltic heritage.
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