Now almost a century later, according to genealogists, genetic tests confirm for the first time that Britton’s daughter, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was indeed Harding’s biological child.
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Not many believed her at the time and she was called a “sex pervert” and a “degenerate” for telling her story.
Harding was president from 1921 until his death in 1923. Before Britton, Harding kept up an intermittent affair with a woman named Carrie Phillips, whom the Republican National Committee is suspected to have paid thousands of dollars for her silence.
“My grandmother – right now she has the biggest smile on her face”, he said.
Warren Harding, 33, when he was an Ohio senator in 1889. She died in 2005.
The president’s letters to Phillips painted vivid – some might say lurid – images of carnal pleasures, as NPR’s Don Gonyea reported when they were published online last year by the Library of Congress.
But now that the familial connection has been proven, Harding said, his family has embraced the news and are now in the process of planning a family reunion with their newly discovered family members. “When he’s related to me, he’s related to Peter, he’s related to a third cousin – there’s too many nails in the coffin, so to speak”. When Harding ran for president in 1920, segregationist opponents claimed he had “black blood”.
“This has been a family mystery since I became aware of it”, Mr Harding said.
“It’s just part of his overall story, and that’s what we’re trying to present here anyway”, Hall, 58, said.
He talked to his cousin Abigail and tracked down Blaesing, a construction contractor in Portland, Ore.; and the three underwent DNA testing through Ancestry.com. She gave birth to a daughter in 1919, a year before Harding was elected to the White House.
Throughout Peter and Abigail’s childhood, older family members squelched their suspicions of any truth to Britton’s story.
Elizabeth’s grandson, James Blaesing, said the Brittons were followed and their home broken into in an attempt to discredit her. While he was “growing up in school, they belittled (them)”.
The child born of their union, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was the only known offspring of the 29th president.
The DNA test should put historians finally at ease about questions on Harding’s personal life, ending the division wrought by the President’s Daughter in the 87 years since its publication.
Blaesing said the family lived with scorn for decades.
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“I wanted to prove who she was and prove everyone wrong”, he said.
