It was bad enough that President Barack Obama lost his US Senate super majority to a Republican. Now it turns out he also lost it to a relative.

美国总统贝拉克·奥巴马所在的民主党近日失去了在参议院的绝对多数席位，这已经很让人扫兴，而日前研究人员发现，抢去这关键一席的共和党人竟是他的亲戚。

 It was bad enough that President Barack Obama lost his US Senate super majority to a Republican. Now it turns out he also lost it to a relative.

Genealogists said on Friday that the Democratic president and the newly elected senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, are 10th cousins.

The New England Historic Genealogical族谱的，家系的 Society said Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and Brown's mother, Judith Ann Rugg, both descend³ from Richard Singletary of Haverhill, Massachusetts.

He died in 1687 at, for the time, the unusually old age of 102.

"I think it's a really interesting thing, where you have the separation between a Democrat² and a Republican, but you have one link," said David Allen Lambert, the society genealogist¹ who co-discovered the connection with colleague Chris Child.

Lambert said the work was aided by prior research about Obama, as well as Brown's cooperation with the society when researchers first contacted him in December.

"I'm glad to be in such distinguished著名的，高贵的 company," Brown said of the findings.

In 2008, the society discovered that Obama is related to seven prior presidents, including George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford⁵, Lyndon Johnson, Harry⁶ S. Truman and James Madison. They also learned he was related to actor Brad Pitt.

Brown, once a little-known state senator, jolted震惊，颠簸 the national political landscape by capturing the Senate seat held for nearly a half-century by the late Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy.

When he is seated, Brown will become the 41st Republican in the Senate. That means the Democrats⁸ will no longer hold the 60-vote supermajority needed to overcome Republican procedural maneuvers⁹军事演习 to block votes on legislation such as a health care reform bill, Obama's top legislative¹⁰ priority.

The genealogical chart shows that Obama descends¹¹ from Richard's eldest¹² son, Jonathan Singletary. He later changed his surname to Dunham. Brown, meanwhile, descends from Jonathan's brother, Nathaniel Singletary.