Let's hope this doesn't run into the present day Rudds although...

Let's hope this doesn't run into the present day Rudds although he's in the right position to steal everything you have (he really wouldn't .....would he?)

KEVIN Rudd is descended from an 18th-century street urchin accused of "highway robbery" when she was 11 years old, who escaped a death sentence for stripping another girl of her clothes in an outdoor toilet.
While Newspoll reveals today an increase in the number of Australian voters who find the Prime Minister arrogant and out of touch, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has lifted the lid on his humble family background.

Thomas Rudd, his paternal 4th great-grandfather, was transported to Australia in 1881 to serve a seven-year sentence for stealing a bag of sugar.
He married fellow convict Mary Cable, who had stolen a bolt of cloth, before his sentence was complete. Another ancestor stole 200 pounds of glue and a great-grandmother was convicted in 1798 of forging coins.

Elder Vinson, who presented the ancestral history to Mr Rudd today with other church leaders, said another ancestor, Mary Wade, was a "grand Australian matriarch who began life begging for food as an urchin on the streets of London''.

"In 1788 she and an older girl named Jane Whiting coaxed an eight-year-old girl into a privy where they stripped her off her dress, petticoats and linen tippet and cap and absconded,'' he said.

After the pair where caught, the young Mary was revealed of having threatened violence during the attack: "I was in a good mind to have chucked her down the necessary (another term for privy) and I wish I had done so,'' she said.

Sentenced to be "hanged from the neck until she be dead" she instead spent moths in a rat-infested jail before being transported to Australia before she was a teenager.

A transcript of Mary Wade's trial is available on the Old Bailey website.
The church presented two leather-bound volumes containing Mr Rudd's pedigree at a private handover at the Lodge this morning.

The Latter-Day Saints said they had been studying Mr Rudd's ancestry since March 2007.

"We regard today's presentation as our gift to the nation,'' Elder Vinson said.