Washington: US President George W Bush and presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Senator John Kerry are related, according to media reports.

Rapidly spreading ancestral roots and branches digitally mapped out by the family forest project reveal closer family ties than originally thought between President Bush and Senator Kerry.

According to a fully sourced ancestral history lineage-linked in the family forest Web page, Bush and Kerry are now calculated to be 9th cousins twice removed, 'The Washington Times' reported with a headline "kissing cousins", and as more of the pair's ancestral lines continue to grow, the relationship might become even closer, the paper quoted experts as saying.

On top of that, Bush and Kerry have several intriguing cousins in common - Walt Disney, Michael Douglas, Clint Eastwood, the Wright brothers, Meriwether Lewis Hugh Hefner, Clara Barton, Georgia O'Keeffe, Princess Diana - and even former Vermont Governor Howard Dean.

Other members of the proud Bush-Kerry family include Benedict Arnold (General Arnold, who defected to the British during the revolutionary war and to whom Kerry compares Chief Executive Officers of companies who outsource jobs to countries like India), Crown Prince Leka II of the Albanians, Prince Emanuel Filiberto of Italy, Crown Princess Margarita of Romania, Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, Princess Alexandra of Greece, Crown Prince Felipe of Spain, singer David Crosby and John Hinckley Jr (who shot and wounded President Reagan).