Ralph Lincoln and his kinship with Abraham Lincoln through Mordecai Lincoln

Ralph Lincoln likes to stress his resemblance to Abraham Lincoln and even wears an old-fashioned suit and a top hat in the manner of the famous Lincolnian image. A public figure and speaker on American history, above all on the biography of the 16th President of the United States, Ralph is known as a "relative of Lincoln in the 11th generation". An utterly peculiar formulation, is it not? Stranger still are the collages in which Ralph insistently demonstrates his "likeness" to Abe, a highly equivocal one and rather hard to make out. Meanwhile, behind the murky formula hides the following family connection: Abraham is the grand-nephew of Mordecai Lincoln, Ralph's great-great-great-great-grandfather. Ralph himself describes such kinship as third cousin of the President. I would put it more simply: the fifteenth water on the jelly, as we say in Russia, meaning kin so remote that it is scarcely kin at all.