A relative from 800 years ago doesn't honestly seem that impressive. That's ~30 generations? That's a whole lot of people. Good luck finding a venue large enough for that family reunion.
That said, what's incredibly impressive, if true, is that someone managed to track each of their geneologies that far back along that line. That's not an easy feat. And this isn't just an internet legend: at the very least there really was a girl who really did put together a chart, and she got taken seriously enough to have it included in a Library of Congress exhibit on the Magna Carta [0].
I'd be interested to see the actual chart she made. One possible explanation for how she was able to do this is if each of the presidents connects up to English aristocracy fairly recently, which would account for the records being intact and would be more interesting than just the fact of a shared ancestor in ~1200.
[0] https://loc.gov/exhibits/magna-carta-muse-and-mentor/magna-c...
> One possible explanation for how she was able to do this is if each of the presidents connects up to English aristocracy fairly recently
That would honestly be a more interesting finding personally, discovering that all of America's greatest political leader are just imported British aristocracy.
In the early US "democracy" , only British aristocrats had a vote.
Obama's most recent aristocratic ancestor appears to be a "Sir Henry Bold" his 16x great-grandfather.
A quick look at some of the genealogies makes it appear that many rely on the same source, which lists 900 royal descendants that immigrated to the new world[1].
With 900 of them several generations back, it wouldn't be too surprising that many politicians would be related.
1: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0806320745/ref=as_li_tl?ie...
Essentially zero US presidents are Asian, Hispanic, etc. Pick a Native American from 30 generations ago and you don’t see this kind of family tree. It’s an expanded circle of privilege through time.
Give it another 250 years and we’ll probably have a largely Asian president that’s also a descendant. IE: It’s an expanding circle of political elites combined with an expanding circle of descendants.
"In 2004 mathematical modeling and computer simulations ... indicated that our most recent common ancestor probably lived no earlier than 1400 B.C.and possibly as recently as A.D. 55. "
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-all-mo...