Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair are cousins, reveals Ancestry.ca

TORONTO, April 11, 2013 /CNW/ - Perhaps portending a future Centre-Left Coalition on Parliament Hill, family history experts at Ancestry.ca, Canada's leading family history resource, have discovered that Thomas Mulcair and Liberal Party of Canada leadership frontrunner Justin Trudeau are related through shared French-Canadian ancestors.

Trudeau - running for leader of the Liberal Party at this weekend's convention - and Mulcair - the official leader of the Opposition - share a family connection that goes back 400 years to their shared eighth great-grandparents Mathieu Amiot and Marie Miville. The politicians are ninth cousins.

Amiot and Milville lived in Quebec in the 1600s. They were married in 1650 and were among some of Quebec's earliest settler families.

Amiot was born in the late 1620s and worked as an interpreter for the Jesuits. When he married Marie, who was born in 1632, her dowry brought him property in the town of Québec, making him a very successful landowner.

"It's always fun to find a family connection between two people who are closely tied through their work, but it becomes even more interesting when they are rivals, whether in business or politics," said Lesley Anderson, a family historian and content specialist with Ancestry.ca. "It's amazing to think that a marriage that took place almost 400 years ago could produce two of the three major political players of a country that didn't formally exist when the marriage took place. I think they would have been proud of their legacy."

This isn't the first time Ancestry.ca has uncovered a connection between two political rivals. In 2011, Ancestry.ca revealed that Ontario's then-provincial election rivals Tim Hudak and Dalton McGuinty are tenth cousins, also through French Canadian roots.

About Ancestry.ca
Ancestry.ca was launched in January 2006 and is part of Ancestry.com Inc. the world's largest online family history resource with approximately 2.5 million paying subscribers across all its websites. More than 11 billion records have been added to the Ancestry.com sites and users have created more than 46 million family trees containing more than 4 billion profiles.

In addition to its flagship site www.ancestry.com, the company operates several Ancestry international websites along with a suite of online family history brands including Archives.com, Fold3.com and Newspapers.com, all designed to empower people to discover, preserve and share their family history.

SOURCE: Ancestry.ca

Ginger Shewell
Media Profile
416-342-1802
[email protected]