Last summer, the 29th president’s love letters to a mistress were released; now comes news that DNA tests show Harding did in fact father a child with another mistress, whose claims were denied for decades. According to The New York Times, Ancestry.com division AncestryDNA has done DNA tests that prove that Elizabeth Ann was Harding’s daughter.
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Ms. Britton, who was 31 years younger than Harding, had a harder time proving her relationship when she revealed it after his death because she had destroyed her own letters with him at his request and because his family insisted he was sterile. Britton unsuccessfully sought financial support from Harding’s widow and even wrote a book called The President’s Daughter. The book detailed a long-running affair between Harding had with another mistress Carrie Phillips, following the discovery of a trove of love letters written by the president to Phillips.
Dr Peter Harding, one of the former president’s grand-nephews who spearheaded getting the DNA tests done, told the BBC he is “totally jubilant” to finally know the truth about Blaesing’s father.
“We’re looking at the genetic scene to see if Warren Harding and Nan Britton had a baby together and all these signs are pointing to yes”, Baloglu told the Times. Abigail Harding added that there were now “too many nails in the coffin” and she was “completely convinced”.
“I’m very pleased that that’s the result just because that family deserves to be recognized”, he said.
Harding was a U.S. senator from Ohio when the affair began.
Harding historian James Robenalt compares Britton to the Monica Lewinsky of her time.
This news at least makes Harding somewhat interesting now.
His estate left no money for his daughter or Britton, who had kept their child and their six-and-a-half-year love affair a secret. She’s up in heaven right now doing an “eat me” dance around everyone who talked sh-t about her in life.
Harding, who died in office in 1923, never had a child with his wife; for years, his family said that he had been rendered infertile by a case of the mumps.
James Blaesing, a Portland contractor, is talking about his grandmother, Nan Britton.
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“I went through this growing up in school”, said Blaesing, 65, now a construction contractor in Portland, Oregon.
