Taylor Swift’s Formidable Female Forebears

Thanks to this mother-daughter duo, she’s got cousins around the globe

Please enjoy this admittedly idyllic, AI-rendered image generated from the author’s prompts speculating what Taylor’s 2nd and 3rd great-grandmothers might have looked like beside the shore of a totally made-up version of Simon’s Town, South Africa.

When it comes to genealogy, I prefer fresh territory, which is why I usually avoid the mega-famous. If someone is universally renowned, it’s a given that hundreds, if not thousands, have already poked around the branches of their family tree, so what’s left to discover?

But on the few occasions I’ve gone ahead anyway, I’ve almost always wound up tripping across neglected or hidden pockets of ancestry, so when a journalist friend reached out with a specific request involving Taylor Swift, I agreed. I admire the hell out of her, so why not?

As is my habit, I started from scratch (too much sloppy research floating out there online that can lead you astray), and it didn’t take long to answer his question. That should have been the end of it, but an intriguing ancestor — the genealogical equivalent of a shiny object — had grabbed my attention and I had to know more.

In this case, it was a colorful great-grandfather who made me dig deeper, but once I did, it was his mother and his mother’s mother I couldn’t get enough of. And while it wasn’t Taylor’s beloved grandmother Marjorie’s branch, it was the one that had produced a man worthy of her.