Republican Sen.-elect Scott Brown speaks to a reporter at his...

Republican Sen.-elect Scott Brown speaks to a reporter at his state senate office at the Statehouse in Boston. (Jan. 28, 2010) Credit: AP

It was bad enough that President Barack Obama lost his filibuster-proof margin in the U.S. Senate to a Republican. Now it turns out he also lost it to a relative.

Genealogists said Friday the Democratic president and the newly elected Massachusetts senator, Scott Brown, are 10th cousins.

The New England Historic Genealogical Society said Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and Brown’s mother, Judith Ann Rugg, both descend from Richard Singletary of Haverhill, Mass.

He died in 1687 at, for the time, the unusually old age of 102.

“I think it’s a really interesting thing, where you have the separation between a Democrat and a Republican, but you have one link,” said David Allen Lambert, the society genealogist who co-discovered the connection with colleague Chris Child.

Lambert said the work was aided by prior research about Obama, as well as Brown’s cooperation with the society when researchers first contacted him in December.

In 2008, the society discovered that Obama is related to seven prior presidents, including George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S. Truman and James Madison. They also learned he was related to actor Brad Pitt.

Brown, a little-known state senator, beat heavily favored Democrat Martha Coakley last week to claim the Senate seat held for nearly a half-century by a Democratic icon, the late Edward M. Kennedy.

Brown’s staff did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his newfound relation to the president, but Lambert said he had exchanged e-mails with the senator-elect on Thursday and sent him a chart of the relationship on Friday.

It shows that Obama descends from Richard’s eldest son, Jonathan Singletary. He later changed his surname to Dunham. Brown, meanwhile, descends from Jonathan’s brother, Nathaniel Singletary.

Richard Singletary, like his two descendants, held public office. He served as a town selectman in both Salisbury and Haverhill in the 1650s, the society said.

The society also found Brown is related to six prior presidents, including George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush and Richard Nixon.

Also on Friday, George Stephanopoulos, co-anchor of ABC News’ “Good Morning America” learned he was likely related to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Stephanopoulos underwent DNA testing to promote “Faces of America With Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” a four-part series on family histories premiering Feb. 10 on PBS.

Gates told him during Friday’s “GMA” show that he’s “very likely a maternal cousin with Hillary Clinton.”

“Sorry, Secretary Clinton,” Stephanopoulos said. “I did not set this up.”

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