A Complete Guide to President-Elect Joe Biden’s Sprawling Family

As Biden prepares to be sworn in on Jan. 20 as our country’s 46th president, the outline of Biden’s simultaneously tragic and triumphant personal story is fairly well known by now. 

Joseph Robinette Biden II was born in Scranton, Pa., attended the University of Delaware and law school at Syracuse, and won a longshot race for the U.S. Senate in 1972 just a couple of weeks before his 30th birthday. 

Barely a month after the election, his wife of six years, Neilia, and their 1-year-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash. Their sons, 3-year-old Beau Biden and 2-year-old Hunter Biden, were hospitalized for several months with serious injuries.

Joe and Jill welcomed daughter Ashley, their only child together, on June 9, 1981.

She attended Tulane and later got her master’s degree in social work from University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice in 2010. Though originally drawn to activism to protect animals, she became a social worker and went to work for the Delaware Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families, after which she spent more than seven years as associate director of the Delaware Center for Justice. She founded the clothing brand Livelihood in 2017, partnering with Gilt on a line of hoodies that sold out, to raise money for community programs focused on eliminating income inequality. The logo is an LH being pierced by an arrow—a tribute to her late brother, Beau.

It’s a reference to how “we have to sometimes be pulled all the way down to shoot forward,” Ashley explained to The Lily in June. “He was my bow. His cancer brought me to my knees. I had no choice but to shoot forward, keep going, keep aiming at my own dreams.” Naturally, her father was at New York Fashion Week to support her when she debuted the garment.

“I’m extremely proud of her,” Joe told E! News at the NYFW event, flashing a huge grin. “She’s been trying to change the world since she’s been 3 years old, and I think she’s going to do it.”

In an interview with Today, Ashley said she would not have a job in her father’s administration, but planned to use her platform “to advocate for social justice, for mental health, to be involved in community development and revitalization. I do hope to bring awareness and education to some subjects that are really important.”

She met her husband—a plastic surgeon, professor of otolaryngology and chief medical officer of the venture capital firm StartUp Health—through Beau.

Howard asked his future father-in-law for his permission (granted) and popped the question atop a cliff in Big Sur, Calif., at sunset. He and Ashley married in June 2012 at the same Catholic church in Delaware where she was baptized and they live in Philadelphia.

“I think to myself, aw, God, my little girl! This can’t have passed so quick,” the father of the bride told People before the wedding. But, he added, “This is the right guy. And he’s getting a helluva woman.”

Joe invokes his late son, Joseph R. “Beau” Biden III, frequently, the former Army major and two-term Delaware attorney general’s courage and devotion to his family still an inspiration to his father. Beau died of glioblastoma in 2015, the devastation wrought on the whole family influencing Biden’s choice not to run for president in 2016—but also his decision to go for it in 2020.

“I wanted to celebrate Beau’s life and the people he touched,” Joe told the New York Times in 2017, explaining the motivation behind his memoir Promise Me, Dad. “Beau had a strict code of honor. That may sound silly, but it’s true. My Dad had an expression: ‘Never explain and never complain.’ I never once heard Beau complain. Not once.”

Joe continued, “One night, when it was clear that the odds weren’t good, he asked me to stay after dinner at his house, about a mile from here. He said: ‘Dad, I know you love me more than anyone in the world. But promise me you’ll be O.K. I’ll be O.K., Dad.’ He had come face to face with his mortality. He watched me go through the loss of his mother and sister. And he didn’t want me to turn inward. He didn’t want me to give up on the robustness of life.”

In his eulogy for his brother, Hunter recalled his first memory of Beau: Waking up in the hospital next to him in 1972 after the car wreck that killed their mom and sister.

Their father told the New York Times in 2017, “Hunt had a skull fracture, almost every bone in his body was broken. And Beau, just 4, in the next bed, held his hand and kept saying: ‘Hunt, I love you. Look at me. I love you, I love you, I love you.’ At the funeral Hunt said in 42 years that ‘he has never stopped holding my hand.'”

On Jan. 19, he spoke at the National Guard/Army Reserve center named after his son before leaving for Washington, D.C., expressing how proud he was to be “a son of Delaware. And I am even more proud to be standing here doing this from the Major Beau Biden facility. Ladies and gentlemen, I only have one regret: He’s not here. Because we should be introducing him as president.” 

Beau married Hallie Biden (née Olivere) in 2002. They welcomed daughter Natalie Naomi Biden (her middle name paying tribute to Beau’s late sister) in 2004 and son Robert Hunter Biden II in 2006.

The four of them lived with Joe and Jill for a year while they were building a home nearby. “I wished they’d never move,” Joe recalled to the New York Times.

After Beau died, Hallie’s dad Ron Olivere, told Delaware’s News Journal in 2015 that Joe Biden consulted his daughter first before he made any decision about whether to run for president in 2016. “He did discuss this with family,” Olivere said. “He discussed it with my daughter and her response was, ‘Pop, we’re behind you all the way. We’re behind you 100 percent.'”

The president-elect’s younger son—who has been candid about his various personal struggles, including his battle with drug addiction—became a controversial target of his father’s political opponents.

With headlines swirling, Hunter steered clear of most of Joe’s campaign events, even before COVID rendered so much of the operation virtual or social-distanced.

“Beau and I have been there since we were carried in baskets during his first campaign,” Hunter told the New Yorker in 2019. “We went everywhere with him. At every single major event and every small event that had to do with his political career, I was there. I’ve never missed a rally for my dad. The notion that I’m not standing next to him in Philadelphia, next to the Rocky statue, it’s heartbreaking for me. It’s killing me and it’s killing him. Dad says, ‘Be here.’ Mom says, ‘Be here.’ But at what cost?”

But ultimately the majority of the American people wanted Joe Biden to be the president regardless of any past wrongdoings or salacious theories about his family, and Hunter—who spoke remotely during the Democratic National Convention in August, when Joe officially accepted the nomination—was right there in person on Nov. 7 for his dad’s victory speech in Wilmington.

Not that Hunter—born Robert Hunter Biden—hasn’t merited his share of scandalous headlines.

The Yale Law School graduate married Kathleen Buhle in 1993 and they have three daughters together: Naomi (again, in tribute to their late sister), born in 1993 and Joe’s eldest grandchild; Finnegan, born in 1998; and Maisy, born in 2010. The longtime couple split up in 2015 and divorced in 2017, with Kathleen citing drug use and infidelity among her husband’s shortcomings in her divorce filing. 

Hunter went on to have a relationship with Hallie, his brother’s widow. “Hallie and I are incredibly lucky to have found the love and support we have for each other in such a difficult time, and that’s been obvious to the people who love us most,” he said in a statement to Page Six when that news got out. “We’ve been so lucky to have family and friends who have supported us every step of the way.”

Then, in 2019, he was sued for child support by Lunden Alexis Roberts, who claimed Hunter was the father of her child—referred to in court documents by the initials NJR—born in August 2018. Hunter at first denied having a sexual relationship with the woman, but in January 2020 an Arkansas judge signed off on an order of paternity, a DNA test having proven that he was the child’s biological dad. Hunter subsequently agreed to pay an undisclosed amount of monthly child support, according to CNBC.

In May 2019, Hunter married Melissa Cohen, a documentary filmmaker from South Africa, in a rooftop ceremony in Los Angeles after a whirlwind courtship. Case in point: According to the New Yorker, just days after their first date, Hunter had “shalom” (Hebrew for hello, goodbye and peace) tattooed on the inside of his left bicep to match one that Melissa has. And then a few days after that, he proposed.

Then they tied the knot, all in the same month.

After the ceremony, Hunter told the magazine, “I called my dad and said that we just got married. He was on speaker, and he said to her, ‘Thank you for giving my son the courage to love again.’ And he said to me, ‘Honey, I knew that when you found love again that I’d get you back.’ And my reply was, I said, ‘Dad, I always had love. And the only thing that allowed me to see it was the fact that you never gave up on me, you always believed in me.'”

Hunter and Melissa welcomed a son March 28, 2020, and the 8-month-old (whose name they have not shared) was in his dad’s arms when the family reunited for President-Elect Biden’s victory speech Nov. 7.

Hunter wasn’t kidding about the whole family being in the habit of coming together for every significant event on Joe’s political calendar over the years. Here, at a DNC meeting in 2007, his daughters Finnegan and Naomi, with their cousin Natalie (in Naomi’s arms), sat beside their Uncle Beau.

Jill made an appearance with her five grandchildren and new daughter-in-law Melissa in May 2019.

Joe told Anderson Cooper during a virtual CNN town hall in March, before grandbaby No. 6 was born, “Every single day, I speak to all five of my grandkids. Either on the phone, or I text with them.”

Natalie and Robert lived nearby, he shared, and—with social distancing the order of the day—”we sit on our back porch and they sit out on the lawn with two chairs there, and we talk about everything that is going on in their day. And talk about being home from school. And who’s driving whom crazy, and so on.”

Naomi Biden, who graduated from Columbia Law School this summer, tweeted out a photo of the five older grandkids hugging their grandpa when they found out he had won the 2020 election on the morning of Nov. 7.

Her pinned tweet, from Oct. 22, reads, “Anyone who wants to get to @JoeBiden, will have to get past us first…We may not look intimidating, but remember, our Nana is
@DrBiden…”

In it’s a small world after all news, Naomi and Tiffany Trump were undergraduates at University of Pennsylvania together (future President Donald Trump and future President-Elect Joe Biden both attended the graduation in 2016), and Tiffany shared a photo of her and Naomi hanging out in the Hamptons in the summer of 2018. 

Joe is the eldest of four siblings, and sister Valerie Biden Owens has been a familiar figure on (all the) campaign trails in her brother’s life. In fact, she’s been his closest political advisor for almost half a century.

“We all know him as a great talker,” she told Axios in an interview after her big brother was declared the winner of the 2020 election. “I mean: There goes Biden again—as I’m doing right now—talking and talking. But my brother’s even a better listener.”

Asked what she’d call him once he officially became president, Valerie said, “Joey. Joe.” Or, “if he calls me First Sister, I’ll call him Mr. President.”

Don’t underestimate the general excitement over the return of dogs to the White House after four years of there not being any first pets to coo over.

The Bidens have two German shepherds—Champ, acquired in December 2008 from a Pennsylvania breeder when he was about six weeks old and named by granddaughters Finnegan and Maisy; and Major, who will be the first-ever rescue dog to ascend to the West Wing.

According to the Washingtonian, Joe and Jill started fostering Major in March 2018 after daughter Ashley shared a post on Facebook about a litter of German shepherd puppies that had been exposed to toxins in the house where they were born. They officially adopted him about eight months later from the Delaware Humane Association.

During the campaign, Joe’s four granddaughters crowded onto a couch for an interview with PBS News Hour, in which they acknowledged their Pop’s well-documented love of ice cream and confirmed that he really does call everyday.

“He’ll pick up our calls no matter where he is,” Naomi Biden, Hunter’s eldest daughter and Joe’s first grandchild, said. “He’ll be onstage, giving a speech, and we’d call him and he’d be like, ‘What’s wrong?!'” Giggles all around.

“We’ve grown up together,” she explained. “He’s made sure that every single tradition, every holiday, we’re all together…I don’t think there’s been any decision, no matter how big or small, that we haven’t decided as a family.”

When their grandfather was considering throwing his hat in the ring for president yet again, Naomi was the one to call the family meeting. “He thought we were calling a meeting sort of to, like, discuss whether or not we wanted him to,” she said, “but really we were calling him to be like, ‘Get in that race!'”

Talking to former first daughter Jenna Bush Hager on Today recently, Ashley Biden said, nodding with emotion, “I’m just so proud, I truly am, proud of my father.”

Asked about the times during the Biden campaign when not only her dad, but also her brother Hunter and everything the family stood for, was under fire, Ashley (who keeps her social media accounts private) admitted it was hard. But, she said, “In those moments we had each other. Yes, it hurts, right, but you also know the truth. At the end of the day they may get it wrong, but at least I got it right. At least I know the real deal.”

(Originally published Nov. 17, 2020, at 3:30 p.m. PT)