Taylor Swift
According to Ancestry.com, the singer and poet are sixth cousins, three times removed, both descended from a 17th-century English immigrant
According to Ancestry.com, Taylor Swift is related to poet Emily Dickinson, who shared the news in an exclusive report with NBC's Today.
On Monday, the genealogy company announced that “Swift and Dickinson are both descended from a 17th-century English immigrant (Swift's ninth great-grandfather and Dickinson's sixth great-grandfather, who was an early settler of Windsor, Connecticut).”
Swift's ancestors apparently “remained in Connecticut for six generations until their part of the family finally settled in northwestern Pennsylvania, where they married into the Swift family line.”
Dickinson and Swift are sixth cousins, three times removed. Dickinson, born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830, is considered one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson lived in seclusion in her family home and published only anonymously during her lifetime.
Notably, Swift has previously mentioned the poet in public comments about her songwriting. When accepting the 2022 songwriter-artist of the decade award from the Nashville Songwriters Association International, she said, “If my lyrics sound like a letter written by Emily Dickinson's great-grandmother while sewing a lace curtain, then that's me.” write with the pen.” Genre.”
Fans have also long associated Swift's ninth studio album, Evermore, with Dickinson, pointing out that her release date for the album – December 10, 2020 – was Dickinson's birthday, among other lyrical connections to the poet's prose.
The news of this connection is appropriate considering Swift's next album, due out in April, is titled The Tortured Poets Department. While Swift is currently on the Asian leg of her hugely successful Eras tour, she revealed during a performance in Australia in February that writing her new album over the past two years reminded her “why songwriting is something that actually gets me through my life.”
“I’ve never had an album where I needed more songwriting than Tortured Poets,” she told fans.
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