Borodino, Russia
President Vladimir Putin is descended from serfs who belonged to relatives of the first royal czars, a Moscow genealogist has found. At Putin’s request, genealogist Vladimir Melnikov traced the president’s family back as far as he could: 13 generations. The earliest ancestor he found was Yakim Nikitin, a peasant who lived on Romanov land in the early 1600s with his sons, Faddei, Frol, and Tit. Had Putin’s ancestors belonged to a lesser noble, there would have been few extant records.
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