Here’s a fun one. Even in the world of fantasy genealogy, some claims stand out.
Every so often we hear the claim George Washington, the first American president, was a male-line descendant of Odin. Of course it’s not true, and of course it’s a fascinating idea.
It all goes back to 1879, when Albert Welles published The pedigree and history of the Washington family: derived from Odin, the founder of Scandinavia, B.C. 70, involving a period of eighteen centuries, and including fifty-five generations, down to General George Washington, first president of the United States. (Yes, really.)
I just found a review by Yvonne Seale–George Washington: A Descendant of Odin? in Public Domain Review (Feb. 8, 2017).
Searles says, “Welles created a family tree for Washington of truly mythical proportions, and one which shows just how useful nineteenth-century Americans found the Middle Ages to be when it came to shaping their understandings of their country’s origins.”
Perhaps one of Welles’ contemporaries said it best. According to Searles, “In a letter to the editor published in a July 1889 issue of The Nation magazine, the genealogist W.H. Whitmore declared that ‘it is only fair to suppose that Mr. Welles was not in a sound state of mind’ when he put pen to paper. The book was a ‘rank and stupid forgery’, ‘a mere rambling collection of useless notes.’
Even so, I’ve met folks who take it seriously. If you’ve ever worked in a shared online family tree, you’re nodding in agreement right now. Amateur genealogy on the Internet is full of this stuff.
But, as Searle says, what’s interesting about Welles’ hodepodge isn’t the claim Washington is descended from Odin. It’s how, from a distance, we see some of the ways our American ancestors tried to ground their identity in continuity with the Old World. “Welles was in a sense extending Euro-American history back into the far past. Rather than a nation which could trace its origins back only a hundred years or so from the time of Welles’ writing, or a continent whose colonization could be traced back to the voyages of an Italian Catholic, Anglo-American Protestants were cast as heirs to a long northern European tradition of exploration, conquest, and colonization.”
And this effort comes even at the cost of bending history into political propaganda. Welles attached “no credence to reports of the Cavalier sentiments of the Washington family”. As Searle says, Welles thought “it was impossible that any ancestor of George Washington could have harbored royalist as opposed to republican sympathies during the English Civil War of the seventeenth century, because no member of the extended Washington clan could ever display a love of ‘power without principle’. The Washingtons were, after all, almost entirely of Germanic descent — untainted by the continental European influences of Norman blood — and throughout the centuries, ‘Saxon opposition to the Norman rule in England took the form of liberalism’.
This is my kind of stuff. Searle’s review worth the read, even if your interest in George Washington and Odin is superficial.
This article has been revised to update the links.