Sara Haines teared up live on The View after learning she’s related to not one, but two, U.S. presidents.
Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates Jr. visited The View table on Thursday, where he told the hosts a little about Haines’ ancestry—including one who abandoned a woman he’d gotten pregnant in the 1700s. But the part that brought Haines to tears in the clip shown from her upcoming appearance on the show was a portrait of a familiar face.
“Do you know who that is?” Gates Jr. asks her in the video.
“He looks like a lot of people in my history book,” Haines says, as he shows her a photo of John Adams.
“He is your third cousin, nine times removed!” Gates Jr. tells her.
“Oh my God. I’m related to a president!” she replies. She adds with a laugh, “And he was a good one!”
As John Adams’ son, John Quincy Adams, became the country’s sixth president, Haines scored a two-fer with the realization, as Gates Jr. pointed out to the hosts after the clip. Haines is “related not to one president, but to two presidents,” he said.
“We only had one other guest in the history of the series who was related to a president, unhappily so, and that was Michael Moore, who was related to Herbert Hoover,” Gates Jr. continued. “You are our first guest happily related to two United States presidents!”
After learning he is a sixth cousin, once removed, of a descendant of Hoover’s, the liberal filmmaker told PBS he was disappointed. “When he told me I was related to one of the 45 presidents, I was like thinking, oh, you know, Kennedy or hey, maybe Obama,” Moore joked.
Before Haines, Joy Behar, Ana Navarro, and Sunny Hostin each appeared as guests on Finding Your Roots, and Whoopi Goldberg appeared on Gates Jr.’s first iteration of the series, African American Lives.
