Britton first came forward publically with the claim that her daughter, Elizabeth Ann, was Harding’s daughter in a 1927 autobiography “The President’s Daughter.” In her account, Britton detailed a steamy six-year-long affair with the 29th president, including one encounter in a White House closet, before his untimely death in 1923.
At the time of its publishing, the book was met with public ridicule and widely discounted as the stuff of pornographic fiction. Britton was labeled a “sex pervert” and “degenerate,” and a book was even written to counter her claims about Harding, who was married to Florence Mabel Harding.
Harding historian James Robenalt compares Britton to the Monica Lewinsky of her time.
“Nan Britton was someone who had to live through a lot of attacks … and I think her story was a lot like Monica Lewinsky because there was a real shaming process,” Robenalt said. “She was just picking up for her daughter, who we now know was Harding’s daughter, and she was just viciously attacked for it.”
But recent DNA testing by Ancestry has proven that James Blaesing, the son of Harding’s biological daughter, Elizabeth Ann, is the second cousin of the president’s grandnephew Peter Harding and his grandniece Abigail Harding...
All his life, Harding said, his family had maintained that Britton was a "delusional woman who believed in a fantasy." The family believed that President Harding, who had mumps as a child, was sterilized by the illness and could not have children.
But upon reading the book, and comparing the love letters Britton described in her book to those written to Phillips and included in Robenalt's book, Harding realized that he "was dealing with a formidable author who was telling the truth."...
So Peter Harding reached out to Britton's descendants and found a willing partner in Jim Blaesing, Britton's grandson and now the proven grandson of the 29th president. After a long process of DNA testing, it wasn’t until recently that Ancestry developed biological testing that was precise enough to accurately connect Harding’s grandnephew to Elizabeth Britton’s grandson.
Harding said the decision to undergo DNA testing, and the subsequent proof of familial connection, has been an emotional journey for both families.
"Each family has their own set of beliefs and we had never discussed this in my family and in Jim’s family," he said. "We both broke with our family ideology, and I feared losing friendships within the family. I was violating a lot of family rules to bring this about.”
But now that the familial connection has been proven, Harding said, his family has embraced the news and are now in the process of planning a family reunion with their newly discovered family members.
The story that Jefferson fathered children by Sally Hemings is almost certainly a myth. DNA tests in 1998 showed that one of the more than two dozen Jefferson males in Virginia in 1807 likely fathered Sally’s son Eston, but no DNA sample from Thomas Jefferson was available for testing. Eston’s descendants passed down the story he was the son of a Jefferson “uncle,” and the president’s brother Randolph — documented by a slave account to have spent his nights at Monticello playing his fiddle and “dancing half the night” with the president’s slaves — was widely known as “Uncle Randolph.” A yearlong examination of all of the evidence by more than a dozen senior scholars from across the country concluded, with but a single mild dissent, that the story is probably false.
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