A Northern Ireland historian has traced the US president-elect's roots back to Co Antrim.
According to local journalist and historian Mr Billy Kennedy, Mr George W. Bush is the 17th US president to be able to trace some ancestral links back to the 18th century Scots-Irish diaspora from the north of Ireland.
In his research for the first of his six Scotch-Irish chronicles - Scotch-Irish in the hills of Tennessee - Mr Kennedy established that one of Mr Bush's ancestors on his mother's side, William Gault, was a first citizen of Tennessee in 1796. He is also listed in the First Families of Tennessee official register as being born in Ireland.
William Gault settled in Blount County in the Great Smoky Mountain region of east Tennessee after moving from North Carolina, probably via Virginia.
Mr George W. Bush's father, former US president George Herbert Walker Bush, personally made formal application along with 13,000 other US families to the East Tennessee Historical Society in Knoxville when the First Families of Tennessee register was being drawn up after the States's bicentennial celebrations in 1996.
In his book, Mr Kennedy lists the other 16 US presidents of Scots-Irish descent as: Andrew Jackson (1829-37); James Knox Polk (1845-49); James Buchanan (1857-61); Andrew Johnson (1865-69); Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77), Chester Alan Arthur (1881-85); Grover Cleveland (1885-89 and 1893-97); Benjamin Harrison (1889-93); William McKinley (1897-1901); Theodore Roosevelt (1905-1909); Woodrow Wilson (1913-21); Harry Truman (1949-53), Richard Nixon (1969-74); James Carter (1976-81); George Bush Snr (1989-93) and Bill Clinton (1993-2001).