POLITICAL GENEALOGY

10 Things You Didn’t Know about Rachel Maddow’s Roots

Declaration of Intention (to become a citizen) for Rachel Maddow’s great-grandfather, John Smits

As both a genealogist and TRMS viewer, I suppose it was inevitable that I would peek into Rachel Maddow’s past, and now seems a fitting time to share a potpourri of gleanings since the g-word — genealogy — keeps popping up in political news, mostly with regard to immigration. Here are some slices of Ms. Maddow’s family history, including a few snippets of her own immigrant saga:

• Rachel Maddow is one-quarter Dutch and one-half Canadian (with roots extending back mainly to Ireland and England). The remaining quarter of her ancestors were Jewish and self-identified as Russian and Polish at the time of their arrival in the U.S., but by today’s borders, their old country hometowns are located in Ukraine and Lithuania.
• If you have any of the following surnames in your family tree, you could be related to Rachel: Bakker, Berhardt, Codnor, Cole, Goss(e), Israelowitz, Keijzer, Kelly, Maddow, Matuk, McGrath, Smits and, my personal favorite, van Ravenswaaij.
• Like many of us, Rachel is sporting a modified version of her family’s original surname. Her Maddow great-great-grandfather came here with four young sons from Poltava, Ukraine. Their name at the time? Medwedof.
• Her Dutch-born great-grandfather, John Smits, did whatever it…