Superstar singer-songwriter Taylor Swift and American football player Travis Kelce have made headlines with their romance since last year.
TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year 2023 Taylor Swift has had a secret family connection to one of America’s most revered poets of all time.
Announced in an exclusive report by genealogy website Ancestry, Taylor was revealed as a distant cousin (sixth cousins, three times removed to be exact) of Emily Dickinson. According to Ancestry’s report, commissioned by American TV network NBC’s Today show, the pair are descendants of an English immigrant who settled in the country back in the 17th century. The revelation was announced on the Today show on Monday (March 4).
The report states: “Swift and Dickinson both descend from a 17th century English immigrant (Swift’s 9th great-grandfather and Dickinson’s 6th great-grandfather who was an early settler of Windsor, Connecticut). Taylor Swift’s ancestors remained in Connecticut for six generations until her part of the family eventually settled in north-western Pennsylvania, where they married into the Swift family line.”
The singer’s upcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department, will be released on Friday, April 19. However, this isn’t the first time the two writers have had some form of connection.
Taylor publicly referenced the 19th century poet while talking about the different types of lyrics she writes for her songs. “If my lyrics sound like a letter written by Emily Dickinson’s great-grandmother while sewing a lace curtain, that’s me writing in the Quill genre,” she said in 2022 while receiving the Songwriter-Artist of the Decade Award from the Nashville Songwriters Association International.
Ancestry also made the announcement via Instagram. The account wrote: “We need to calm down…but how can we when we have BIG news!? Renowned American poets Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson are 6th cousins, three times removed.
“Swift and Dickinson both descend from a 17th century English immigrant (Swift’s 9th great-grandfather and Dickinson’s 6th great-grandfather who was an early settler of Windsor, Connecticut). Guess we can truly say that all’s fair in love and poetry.”
But there’s one thing Swift might not have known all too well – the couple share a distant ancestor.
American family historian Christopher C. Child delved into Swift and Kelce’s family history in a blog post for Vita Brevis, the blog of the New England Historic Genealogical Society.
As Child explains, Swift and Kelce have a common ancestor in the form of Nicholas Knapp (c.1606-1670).
Born in England, Knapp emigrated to America in 1630 as part of the Puritan emigration to America. He initially settled in Watertown, Massachusetts.
According to Knapp’s entry, the global free family tree, court records show that shortly after his arrival Knapp “was fined 5 pounds for selling water claiming it would cure scurvy”.
In 1631 Knapp married his first wife, a woman known only as Elinor. Among the couple’s nine children were Caleb Knapp, Taylor Swift’s 8x great grandfather, and Ruth Knapp, Travis Kelce’s 9x great grandmother. According to our current chart, this makes the couple tenth cousins once removed.
Christopher C. Child stresses that this remote degree of kinship shouldn’t be a concern: “People related this far back would likely have little, if any, DNA in common… I find distant kinships between couples this far back frequently. My own parents have common 17th-century New England ancestors, even though my father was from Florida and my mother was from Kansas.”
Distant kinships between couples are surprisingly common. According to 2018 ressearch from Yaniv Erlich, chief science officer at family history company between 1650 and 1850 the average married couple were fourth cousins, whereas by 1950 they were seventh cousins.
