JD Vance’s biography, as told in Hillbilly Elegy, of him being a poor hick from Kentucky, is moonshine
Tue 6:13 am +00:00, 11 Aug 2026
Source: https://mileswmathis.com/vance.pdf
J. D. Vance’s genealogy is very easy to dig out, though the mainstream sites are lamely trying to hide it.
Findagrave gives us just about everything we need to know, and I will fill it out for you with external
research.
But first I will tell you how I got into this. It is as interesting as the rest of it. I buy interesting books
from Ebay and Abebooks, as I have said before, provided they are way underpriced. One of the ones I
bought last year that has been sitting on my shelf is an 1883 Americans of Royal Descent, by Charles
H. Browning, one of only 120 first edition copies signed by him and having a two-headed phoenix on
the title page. It caught my eye today because it was mis-shelved, not lying flat but being cocked, so I
pulled it and straightened it, then decided to read it. For some reason I opened to the sixth pedigree,
that coming down from Robert the Bruce. It was short and I noticed it ended in a McIlwaine. I laughed
because Bob McIlvaine of the 911 saga immediately came to mind. You remember, the short guy who
always had a tear in his eye for his son that allegedly died on the 106th floor of Tower I. I showed he
was a fraud here, so of course I thought to myself he was probably of these McIlwaines of New
Hampshire who were in the direct line of Scottish kings. But before I could pursue that idea, I noticed
something even better: Robert the Bruce quickly leads us to the Kennedys, who lead us to the Vans,
who become Vances and marry President Andrew Jackson. You will say it can’t be the same Vances,
but it is, and Findagrave proves it.
Vance is his mother’s maiden name, his grandfather being James Lee Vance. You then just click on
fathers back to John Bainey Vance, of Antrim, Northern Ireland. He is the end of the line at
Findagrave, but it doesn’t matter because his daughter is Elizabeth Ellen Vance, and she married Hugh
Thomas Joseph Jackson, son of Capt. John Jackson II. They even give you the visual:
My book confirms that, roughly, though it says Elizabeth Vance married Andrew Sr., not his uncle
Hugh, but either way we have confirmation these are the same Vances. So J. D. Vance is indeed a
direct descendant of Robert the Bruce. Robert then takes us back to Rollo the Viking in one line, and
William the Conqueror in another. Keep going back and we hit Count Judhel Berenger, obviously
Jewish by his name. In another line we hit the Counts of Anjou. And in another we hit the
Sachs/Saxes. But in the main line, we go back to Charlemagne and before him to the Roman emperors.
Closer to the present, Vance is also a Bush, a Howard, and an Arundel, linking him to the Stuart kings
through the Howard dukes. Vance comes directly from Susanna Howard Vance of Surry, North
Carolina. She comes from Matthew Howard, Sr., where this is printed at Findagrave:
Biography: Matthew “Arundel” Howard
Immigrant Patriarch and Noble Refugee (c. 1609 – c. 1658)
Matthew Howard was the progenitor of one of the most influential “First Families of
Maryland,” though history has long obscured the high-stakes political drama of his origins.
The established lineage through the Holy Roman Empire Association and Y-DNA testing
proves that he was born Matthew Arundell, the son of Count Thomas Arundell, 2nd Baron
Arundell of Wardour, and Lady Blanche Somerset.
The Noble Disappearance
Born into the epicenter of English Catholic nobility, Matthew’s life was redirected by the
religious and political turmoil of the early 17th century. To safeguard the family line from
the persecution of “Recusant” Catholics, his family appears to have orchestrated his
“legal death.” In 1620, English records list a Matthew Arundell as deceased at age
eleven; however, the DNA confirms he survived and was spirited to the Virginia colony.
By the 1630s, he emerged in the records of Lower Norfolk County, Virginia, using the
surname Howard. This was a return to his paternal roots—his grandfather, Sir Matthew
Arundell, was a Howard by birth—allowing him to maintain his elite status while shielding
himself from the specific political targets attached to the Arundell title. He arrived not as a
commoner, but as a “Gentleman,” carrying a seal ring engraved with the Howard Coat of
Arms (featuring the Flodden Augmentation), a heraldic right reserved only for the direct
descendants of the Dukes of Norfolk.
According to the same Findagrave pages, Vance is also a Maxwell, a Marrs, a Hays, and an Erskine in
another line, taking him back to William Erskine Marrs of Scotland. The name Erskine is the big one,
indicating Vance is a cousin of tennis player Andy Murray, whose mother is an Erskine. This links
Vance one more time to Scottish royalty.
This means that Vance’s biography, as told in Hillbilly Elegy, of him being a poor hick from Kentucky,
is moonshine. His family may have been unstable, but as you see it is doubtful they were poor. He
supposedly wrote that book in his first year in law school. You don’t normally have time to write
books in your first year in Yale Law School, especially when are also writing for the Yale Law Journal.
He was 26 in that year, and no one writes a memoir at 26. A memoir of what? And why would anyone
care? Who would publish the memoirs of a 26-year-old just entering law school? This makes no sense
unless Vance was a project from the time he was in kneepants.
We have confirmation of that as well, since he went into the Marine Corps at age 18 and spent four
years there. Doesn’t make much sense because if he wanted to be a Marine, he should have waited
until after college graduation, at which point he could go in as an officer. But he must have been being
groomed as scion of Robert the Bruce, since as soon as he graduated from law school he was picked up
by Peter Thiel, going to work at Mithril. You couldn’t find a redder flag, except maybe Langley.
Vance changed his middle name as well as his last name, which I also see as a clue. He allegedly
changed it from Donald to David. Who changes their middle name, and why? Probably because it
wasn’t Donald, instead being a big clue to his real ancestry, something like, oh, I don’t know, Dowling
or Douglas or Drummond.
At any rate, we can already see that, like the rest of these people—think Kamala Harris—Vance’s entire
bio is a lie, to cover what I just showed you. Wikipedia tells us that his mother’s parents came to Ohio
from Kentucky on the Hillbilly Highway in search of industrial factory jobs, implying they were coal
miners before that. Which is way out there. No way these people were coal miners. Vance’s maternal
grandmother was Bonnie Blanton, and her brothers had the middle names Tilden and Windsor. Do
those sound like the middle names of coal miners or factory workers. I remind you that Samuel Tilden
was governor of New York and had the Presidential election of 1876 stolen from him by Hays. These
Tildens were also in Ohio, see Daniel Rose Tilden, a US Congressman from Ohio in the 1840s. No,
these people may have gone to Ohio to work in factories, but they probably owned or ran those
factories. In fact, Findagrave proves this, because Bonnie’s brother Harold Paul Blanton has his
obituary posted there, and it admits he was neither a coal miner nor a factory worker. He owned his
own construction company and lumber company, and yes that is two companies he owned.
He was also a partner in many condominium projects in Alabama.
So that’s busted.
For more, we find the other brother, Thomas Tilden Teaberry Blanton, had a daughter Teresa Blanton,
in that Kentucky home in Breathitt County (no name for a town is ever given), so she would be Vance’s
second cousin, the daughter of his great uncle. Here is what it says on her Findagrave page:
She spent the first six years of her life in Kentucky as the spoiled first grandchild living with her
extended family. Teresa described this time as one of the happiest in her life. She moved to Texas
at age 6, then graduated from Arlington Heights High School and Texas Christian University. At the
time of her graduation from TCU in 1970, she was married and pregnant with her first child, William
Gilliam Cowan Jr. Her daughter, Molly Blaine Cowan, was born in 1974, and her goddaughter, Lena
Stuebing, in 1975. Teresa was a teacher for eight years before she decided to return to school. She
graduated from Baylor Law School in 1982. During her career, Teresa specialized in personal injury
and family law.
So she was a lawyer who married William Gilliam Cowan. I remind you Cowan=Cohen. So again,
this totally blows Vance’s whole story. These people were not hillbillies
