Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton flubbed her family history Wednesday, saying that all of her grandparents had immigrated to America when public records show that just one came to the United States as a child,
BuzzFeed reports.
Speaking at an event in Iowa on her first campaign swing since announcing her candidacy, she spun a tale of an all-immigrant grandparent heritage at Capital City Fruit in Norwalk.
"All my grandparents, you know, came over here, and you know my grandfather went to work in a lace mill in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and worked there until he retired at 65," Clinton said, referring to paternal grandfather Hugh Rodham Sr.
"He started there when he was a teenager and just kept going. So, I sit here and I think, well, you're talking about the second, third generation. That's me, that's you."
Clinton has previously talked about her grandmother immigrating.
But BuzzFeed reports that the former secretary of state's sole foreign-born grandparent was the senior Hugh Rodham.
"Her grandparents always spoke about the immigrant experience, and as a result she has always thought of them as immigrants," a Clinton spokesman told BuzzFeed.
"As has been correctly pointed out, while her grandfather was an immigrant, it appears that Hillary's grandmother was born shortly after her parents and siblings arrived in the U.S. in the early 1880s."
In spinning the tale of grandmother Hanna Jones Rodham last year, Clinton declared that her relative "immigrated with her family as a young girl to Scranton and went to work — very young ― in a silk mill, and then she met and married my grandfather, who had also come to this country as a young man from the coal-mining area in Newcastle, in England."
BuzzFeed, however, posts 1910, 1920, and 1930 census records showing her paternal grandmother was born in Pennsylvania in 1882.
Adds Megan Smolenyak, who researched a story for Irish America, Clinton's grandparents were born in the United States, "with the exception of Hugh," Buzz Feed reports.
Smolenyak also noted that seven of Clinton's eight great-grandparents were immigrants, the website reports.
Donnie Radcliffe, a Washington Post reporter who wrote a biography of Clinton, relates a similar history, Buzz Feed reports.
Watch the video here.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.