FDR was related to 11 other presidents.

Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, 1905

At least two of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s family ties are well known: The nation’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, was his fifth cousin, and he married his fifth cousin once removed, Eleanor Roosevelt. But FDR was related to 10 other presidents, five by blood and six by marriage: John Adams, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, and William Howard Taft.

Other presidents who were distant relations of one another include Abraham Lincoln and George W. Bush (seventh cousins four times removed) and George Washington and Jimmy Carter (ninth cousins six times removed).

Despite his famous family, FDR himself was an only child. He and Eleanor did have six children, however, two of whom entered politics. James Roosevelt represented California’s 26th district in the House of Representatives from 1955 to 1965, while Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. represented New York’s 20th district from 1949 to 1955 and was the under secretary of commerce under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, from 1963 to 1965.

By the Numbers

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FDR unsuccessfully ran for vice president.

A dozen years before winning the highest office in the land, FDR was on the losing end of a presidential election. Ohio Governor James M. Cox chose Roosevelt, who at the time was serving as assistant secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, as his running mate in 1920. It wasn’t meant to be, however, as Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge won in a landslide: 404 electoral votes to Cox’s 127, carrying 37 of 48 states and winning 60% of the popular vote. Coolidge became president when Harding died in office three years later, and FDR went on to win four consecutive elections at the top of the ticket, beginning with the 1932 presidential election.