Judge acknowledges grandson but says Harding exhumation not needed

A request by a grandson of Warren G. Harding to prove his lineage with "scientific certainty" by exhuming his grandfather's body has been denied by a judge in Ohio.

James Blaesing, whose grandmother, Nan Britton, wrote a tell-all book in 1928 about her affair with the 29th president, had the relationship established with help from Ancestry.com and DNA samples from two Harding descendants. But one faction of the family cast doubt on the Ancestry genealogy. So Blaesing sought to establish direct proof that Harding was his grandfather.

But as the threat of an exhumation loomed, the resistant members of the family wrote letters to the court accepting the Ancestry results, said Dr. Peter Martin Harding, whose father is one of the former president's nephews.

Judge Robert Fragale cited those letters as evidence of the family's acceptance of Blaesing as "the grandson of Warren G. Harding and thereby their relative." This removed the need for exhumation, he wrote.

Fragale cited comments from an Ancestry executive in 2015 in which the executive said of genetic testing: "The technology that we're using is at a level of specificity that there's no need to do more DNA testing. This is the definitive answer."

In light of the family's admittedly cool acceptance, disinterment "would serve no legitimate purpose," Fragale wrote.

Peter Martin Harding, 78, a former Navy psychiatrist who lives in Big Sur, Calif., said he had encouraged Blaesing to file the suit requesting the exhumation because he wanted a court to formally acknowledge Blaesing as a member of the Harding family.

And the court did so, finding that "James E. Blaesing is the direct descendant and grandson of President Warren G. Harding."