: SUPERSTAR: Taylor Swift is said to have Swedish roots. Photo credit: Flickr/Chad Davis
The all-American Taylor Swift may have Swedish roots that connect her to a small mountain town called Offerdal.
The 35-year-old singer-songwriter and global superstar is linked to American poet Emily Dickinson through a 17th-century English immigrant, according to American genealogy site Ancestry. Another site, My Heritage, claims that Swift is a descendant of King Louis XIV of France and related to actor Johnny Depp.
Earlier in 2014, unreferenced sources had linked her to Offerdal and when Swift announced that her Eras Tour would visit Sweden between May 17 and 19, Sara Zwedenmark, president of the Offerdal Community Association, decided to look for local ties.
She and the group have now found two possible ancestors of Offerdal, one of whom was named Olof Thorsson. He sailed with his family in 1641 aboard the Kalmr Nyckel to New Sweden – a former colony covering parts of present-day Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He was apparently deported after committing a crime in Sweden.
“We could see that there were people connecting them, but the boundary was broken because one man married several times,” Zwedenmark told the media. “We haven't found a direct line of descent, but we're not saying it doesn't exist. “We're talking about 1,200 people over four centuries, so there could be other possibilities.”
Jons de Smid Andersson, who reached New Sweden with his wife Maria and daughter Brita in 1654, is another possible Swift ancestor.
With so few solid links, Zwedenmark has now asked anyone with even tenuous information to contact her as she and the Offerdal Community Association continue to investigate Taylor Swift's Swedish origins.
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