What do Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson have in common? Well, according to Ancestry.com, it's a little more than just a thing for words. As revealed on the Today show on March 4, Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson are actually related — to be exact, they are sixth cousins, three times removed.
The popular ancestry site traced back Taylor Swift's and Emily Dickinson's DNA and found a common ancestor in an English man named Jonathan Gilette. According to the site's data, Gilette is Swift's ninth great-grandfather and Dickinson's sixth great-grandfather.
Ancestry.com shared that Gilette was a 17th-century English immigrant who was an early settler of Windsor, Connecticut, and while we don't know where in England he originated from, we'll choose to think he was also a London Boy.
Providing more info on Today.com, Ancestry.com revealed that "Taylor Swift's ancestors remained in Connecticut for six generations until her part of the family eventually settled in northwestern Pennsylvania, where they married into the Swift family line." For a bit more context, Dickinson is known to have spent most of her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, which neighbors Connecticut to the south.
If you have dabbled in Swiftie studies even just a bit, then you'd know this isn't the first time Taylor Swift's name has been linked to Emily Dickinson's. Though the genealogy aspect is a first, Swift has been open about the influence of Dickinson's oeuvre on her writing style, particularly what she calls her "quill pen songs" — a.k.a. "songs with lyrics that make you feel all old-fashioned, like you are a 19th-century poet crafting your next sonnet by candlelight." (Cough, cough, Dickinson is a 19th-century poet.)
"If my lyrics sound like a letter written by Emily Dickinson's great-grandmother while sewing a lace curtain, that's me writing in the Quill genre," the star explained during an acceptance speech in 2022. The singer went on to recite the lyrics from her song "Ivy" from her night studio album evermore, as an example of a song that she'd categorize as Quill.
Funnily enough, Swifties have long speculated that evermore is indeed inspired by Dickinson. Not only that, but "Ivy" was also featured in an episode of Dickinson, a 2019 Apple TV+ series about the poet's life.
Well, now that we know the connection runs deeper than just metaphorical quill ink and into the family tree, do we consider Swift a nepo baby? Nepo sixth cousin, three times removed? Mmm, okay, maybe we can stick to the literary influences, but we'd sure love to see Swift's reaction to the news.