Based on DNA from Britton’s grandson and descendants of Harding, the results are 99.9 percent certain, Ancestry said.
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The Nan Britton affair was the sensation of its age, a product of the jazz-playing, gin-soaked Roaring Twenties and a pivotal moment in the evolution of the modern White House. “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”.
The Hardings cut her off. So she wrote a book, The President’s Daughter, in 1927.
Some Harding family members seem willing to accept the DNA evidence of the late president’s love child, but others still aren’t so sure. Her mother wrote a book, The President’s Daughter, in 1927, in an attempt to make money and prove Harding’s paternity after his death at 57 left no financial arrangement for their daughter. She included salacious details of the affair, claiming that they conceived her daughter in Harding’s Senate office and kept the affair alive after he won the presidency in 1920.
“My grandmother – right now she has the biggest smile on her face”, he said. But his family didn’t believe he’d fathered a love child – they thought he’d been made sterile by a case of the mumps, the New York Times reported.
Nan Britton and her daughter Elizabeth Ann Britton.
The flowery, effusive language in those letters further convinced the Harding cousins that Britton’s account was true.
They note that Harding tried to address racial tensions as African Americans moved from the south to major cities; that he maneuvered through the volatile politics of anarchists, socialists and hawks in post-war America; and that he helped institute one of the first global arms treaty.
Harding was married to his wife, Florence, from 1891 until he died. Taken literally, this would mean that Warren Harding’s ancestry diverged from the rest of the human line more than 4.4 million years ago. She was much younger than Harding, an acquaintance of her father – his sister was also her teacher.
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.
Blaesing said the family lived with scorn for decades.
Unfortunately, Nan Britton died in 1991 so she never got a chance to do the suck-it-haters thing on Twitter.
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“I went through this growing up in school”, said Blaesing, 65, now a construction contractor in Portland, Oregon.
