PoliticalGraveyard.com
The Political Graveyard: A Database of American History
Incomplete List of Political Families

Listed below are 1,325 family groupings Most of these are assembled from all of the links between related politicians. Any two people who are linked are in the same family group. If A is related to B, who is related to C, who is related to D, then all four are in the same group.

(Note that links between cousins are included only if they imply at least 1/1024 common ancestry. In other words, first cousins up to seven times removed, second cousins up to five times removed, third cousins up to three times removed, and fourth cousins up to once removed. Fifth and more distant cousins are not linked.)

Family groupings are listed here if they have at least three politician members, linked by blood, marriage, or adoption. They're listed in descending order by the number of politician members; among those with the same number, the oldest families are listed first.

The largest family grouping, which I call the Four Thousand Related Politicians, is further broken down into subsets of more closely related people. An individual may appear in more than one subset.

These groupings — even the names of the groupings, and the areas of main activity — are the result of a computer algorithm working with the data I have, not the choices of any historian or genealogist.

Moreover, these groupings and their names are subject to change as new links are discovered, or the algorithm is revised.

If you know of other relation between any two political figures in my database, please consider bringing it to my attention!
"Enjoy the hospitable entertainment of a political graveyard."
Henry L. Clinton, Apollo Hall, New York City, February 3, 1872		 The Political Graveyard

The Political Graveyard is a web site about U.S. political history and cemeteries. Founded in 1996, it is the Internet's most comprehensive free source for American political biography, listing 338,260 politicians, living and dead.
 
  The coverage of this site includes (1) the President, Vice President, members of Congress, elected state and territorial officeholders in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories; and the chief elected official, typically the mayor, of qualifying municipalities; (2) candidates at election, including primaries, for any of the above; (3) all federal judges and all state appellate judges; (4) certain federal officials, including the federal cabinet, diplomatic chiefs of mission, consuls, U.S. district attorneys, collectors of customs and internal revenue, members of major federal commissions; and political appointee (pre-1969) postmasters of qualifying communities; (5) state and national political party officials, including delegates, alternate delegates, and other participants in national party nominating conventions; (6) Americans who served as "honorary" consuls for other nations before 1950. Note: municipalities or communities "qualify", for Political Graveyard purposes, if they have at least half a million person-years of history, inclusive of predecessor, successor, and merged entities.  
  The listings are incomplete; development of the database is a continually ongoing project.  
  Information on this page — and on all other pages of this site — is believed to be accurate, but is not guaranteed. Users are advised to check with other sources before relying on any information here.  
  The official URL for this page is: https://politicalgraveyard.com/families/index.html.  
  Links to this or any other Political Graveyard page are welcome, but specific page addresses may sometimes change as the site develops.  
  If you are searching for a specific named individual, try the alphabetical index of politicians.  
Copyright notices: (1) Facts are not subject to copyright; see Feist v. Rural Telephone. (2) Politician portraits displayed on this site are 70-pixel-wide monochrome thumbnail images, which I believe to constitute fair use under applicable copyright law. Where possible, each image is linked to its online source. However, requests from owners of copyrighted images to delete them from this site are honored. (3) Original material, programming, selection and arrangement are © 1996-2025 Lawrence Kestenbaum. (4) This work is also licensed for free non-commercial re-use, with attribution, under a Creative Commons License.
What is a "political graveyard"? See Political Dictionary; Urban Dictionary.
Site information: The Political Graveyard is created and maintained by Lawrence Kestenbaum, who is solely responsible for its structure and content. — The mailing address is The Political Graveyard, P.O. Box 2563, Ann Arbor MI 48106. — This site is hosted by HDLmi.com. — The Political Graveyard opened on July 1, 1996; the last full revision was done on February 17, 2025.