“Taylor Swift is distantly related to Emily Dickinson”

According to recent research conducted by Ancestry.com, a site specializing in the reconstruction of family trees, which entrusted the news exclusively to the US NBC program “Today”, later also reported by the “Guardian”, Taylor Swift is distantly related to Emily Dickinson.

According to the report, the singer and the poet who lived between 1830 and 1886, “are both descended from an immigrant who came from England in the 17th century” who settled in the town of Windsor in Connecticut, and who would therefore be the sixth great-grandfather of the Dickinson is the pop star's ninth great-grandfather. Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson would therefore be third cousins, separated by three generations (“sixth cousins, three times removed”).

Again according to the reconstruction conducted by Ancestry.com, apparently the ancestors of the voice of “Cruel Summer” “remained in Connecticut for six generations until part of the family settled in northwestern Pennsylvania, where they intermarried with the line of the Swift family.”

Taylor Swift, among other things, referenced Emily Dickinson and her songwriting in 2022 while accepting the “Songwriter-Artist of the Decade” award from the Nashville Songwriters Association International: “If the lyrics to my songs seem a letter written by Emily Dickinson's great-grandmother while she was sewing a curtain by hand, it's really me who writes with the quill pen”, said the singer.

Furthermore, as highlighted by the Guardian, over the years the pop star's fans have noticed other connections between Swift and Dickinson, in addition to the musician's passion for poetry and writing, at the center of the next recording project “The tortured poets department” due out next April 19 (details here) and about which Taylor stated: “it's an album that – I think more than any record I've ever made – I needed to make. It was truly a lifeline for me. It kind of reminded me why songwriting is something that carries me through life, and there's never been an album where I needed to write songs more than I needed to for 'The tortured poets department' “.