President Clinton claimed he was descended from the Cassidy family in Roslea, Co Fermanagh; Jimmy Carter claimed he had ancestors in Northern Ireland; at the height of the Vietnam war Richard Nixon visited the graves of his pacifist Quaker ancestors in Timahoe; Ronald Reagan went to Ballyporeen and everyone knows the Kennedy family came from Co Wexford.
Now it appears that Al Gore wants to join the long list of Irish-Americans in the White House. It has been reported that Mr Gore's grandmother was born in Northern Ireland, and through a circuitous route he can trace himself back to a Swinney family living in Cork in the mid-18th century. But now Mr Gore's family are claiming the Gore family themselves have pure Irish origins.
Already, Mr Gore's advisers are seeking more details about his family background. Ronald Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times says that by stressing his family life, the campaign hopes to reclaim voters disappointed by Clinton's personal behaviour. Although a number of postings on web sites devoted to the genealogy of the Gore family have failed to find any definite line of ancestors for the Democratic candidate, there have been persistent claims that Mr Gore can be traced back to John Gore, who died in Virginia in 1769. Competing claims say he is descended from Mounce Gore, born in the late 1700s, or from a Samuel Gore, living at the same time.
However, Mr Gore's second cousin, the novelist, playwright and former Democratic politician, Gore Vidal, is claiming the Gores are descended from the famous Gore family which has been settled in Ireland since the 16th century. Gore Vidal - who earlier this week lamented that "50 years ago I used to be the only Gore" - knows the importance of good Irish ancestry for White House hopefuls: he is a stepbrother of the late Jackie Kennedy.
He claims the Gores are descended from a Jacobean adventurer, Sir Paul Gore, the youngest brother of a London mayor, who settled in Co Donegal in the late 16th century, and found political favour by marrying a niece of the Lord Deputy.
Sir Paul acquired a title and Manor Gore before he died in 1629, but Gore Vidal can't make up his mind which one of Paul Gore's six sons was the ancestor he shares with Al Gore. "We descend from one of them, although we can't be sure which one it was," he has said.
Whichever son he finds he is descended from, Al Gore will discover that politics has been in the genes of the Gores for generations. The eldest son, Sir Ralph Gore, was the grandfather of Sir Ralph Gore of Manor Hamilton, who succeeded William Conolly as speaker of the Irish House of Commons. Sir Paul Gore's second son, Arthur Gore of Newtown Gore, Co Mayo, was ancestor of a long line of MPs who sat in the Irish House of Commons for Leitrim and Longford.
In 1730, this line of the family inherited a large estate in Co Wexford when Sir Ar thur Gore married Jane Saunders of Saunderscourt on the banks of the Slaney. Soon afterwards, Arthur entered the House of Lords with a string of titles, including Baron Saunders of the Deeps and Earl of the Arran Islands. The first and second Lord Arran are buried in a family vault which has been sealed up after a string of grave robberies, and the family seat was deserted for generations before being demolished in the 1920s.
The third earl's sister, Lady Anne Gore, married a brother of the Wexford United Irishman, Henry Hatton. In the 19th century, her brother was so poor that he could not afford to send his son Charles to school, and apprenticed him as a page boy in the Vice-regal Lodge (now Aras an Uachtarain). But Charles Gore came into a fortune at the age of 34 when he married the widowed Countess of Kerry in 1845.
His son, Bishop Charles Gore of Oxford, was a radical Anglo-Catholic socialist.
More revolutionary political views were found in the Gore-Booths, descendants of Sir Paul Gore's fourth son, Sir Francis Gore. The Lissadel branch of the family added Booth to their name in 1804, and included the revolutionary sisters, Eva Gore-Booth and Constance, Countess Markievicz.
A junior branch of the family in Co Leitrim later became the Ormsby-Gore family, and included the late Lord Harlech who, as Sir David Ormsby-Gore, was British Ambassador to Washington throughout the Kennedy presidency. As he listened to the strains of Camelot earlier this week, Al Gore might have mused that at least one descendant of the Irish Gores has managed to get to the White House.
