Taylor Swift is related to Emily Dickinson, genealogy company reveals

Taylor Swift is related to poet Emily Dickinson, according to Ancestry.com, who shared the news in an exclusive report with NBC’s Today.

On Monday, the genealogy company divulged that “Swift and Dickinson both descend 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 her part of the family eventually settled in north-western Pennsylvania, where they married into the Swift family line”.

Dickinson and Swift are sixth cousins, three times removed. Dickinson, born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, is regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson lived as a recluse in her family’s home and only published anonymously while she was alive.

Notably, Swift has referenced the poet previously in public comments on her songwriting. In 2022, while accepting the 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, that’s me writing in the quill genre.”

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/mar/04/taylor-swift-emily-dickinson

As an aide, my maternal line in this country also begins in Windsor, CT.