Superstar singer-songwriter Taylor Swift and American football player Travis Kelce have made headlines with their romance since last year.
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 on Wikitree, 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 cousin relationships 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 research from Yaniv Erlich, chief science officer at family history company MyHeritage, between 1650 and 1850 the average married couple were fourth cousins, whereas by 1950 they were seventh cousins.
At the Grammy Awards on 4 February, Taylor Swift won the awards for best pop vocal album and album of the year for her album Midnights, becoming the first artist to win album of the year four times. She also announced her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, which will be released on 19 April.
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (Taylor's Version), the concert film of her wildly successful Eras tour, will be available to stream on Disney+ from 15 March.
Travis Kelce is a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, who will play the San Francisco 49ers at the Super Bowl on Sunday 11 February.
