Troy Jackson’s Longtime Lover Is His Second Cousin
Steve Robinson
Maine Wire
July 30, 2026
The tiny St. John River Valley town of Allagash (population 240) has long been the butt of Maine jokes about its handful of last names and family trees that don’t so much branch as tangle.
Now Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Troy Dale Jackson, 58, and on his fifth pacemaker, finds his own ancestry under the same microscope that eventually ran his predecessor, oyster hobbyist Graham Platner, out of American politics and into hiding.
Jackson, a 26-year politician and lobbyist, has made a career of bragging that he’s a is a fifth-generation logger, but you don’t have to go far back the generational line to find where it crosses paths with the ancestors of his significant other Lana M. Pelletier.
Allagash tipsters and genealogical records confirm that Jackson’s longtime significant other, Lana Pelletier — his high school sweetheart and the mother of his two adult sons, Chace and Camden — is, in fact, his second cousin by blood.
Jackson and Pelletier share the same great-grandparents: Thomas Pelletier and Edith Thibodeau. Thomas and Edith’s daughter Albertine was Troy’s grandmother; their son Louis Sr. was Lana’s grandfather. That makes Troy and Lana second cousins on the Pelletier line.
The pair has been together for Jackson’s entire political career, stretching from his early days as a pro-gun, pro-life, conservative working-class rabble-rouser in the late 1990s and early 2000s through his rise to become a pro-gun-control, pro-late-term-abortion socialist state Senate president.
Pelletier has eschewed the spotlight, slugging along at various state jobs while Jackson has pursued his political ambitions and lucrative side hustles as the political enforcer for Maine’s dwindling labor movement.
…
Jackson has, at various points, referred to Pelletier as his wife in official bios and statements. Locals in the historically Catholic village of Allagash, however, are quick to set the record straight with the dry precision of people who have known both families — or just the one family, depending on your perspective — for generations: The couple is not, and has never been, legally married.
They simply live together, raise kids together and appear together on the occasional mortgage and lawsuit paperwork. In a place where everyone knows everyone’s business, the lack of a marriage certificate is less a scandal than local trivia.
The Family Wreath: Jackson and Pelletier’s common great-grandparents were Thomas Pelletier and Edith Thibodeau Pelletier. Thomas and Edith had two children who matter here: Albertine Pelletier O’Leary and Louis A. Pelletier Sr. Albertine was the mother of Colleen McBreairty, and Colleen was the mother of Troy Jackson. Louis Sr. was the father of Louis A. “Louie” Pelletier Jr. Louie Jr. and his wife, Patricia “Patty” Gardner Pelletier, were Lana Pelletier’s parents. That means Colleen McBreairty and Louie Pelletier Jr. were first cousins. Their children, Troy Jackson and Lana Pelletier, are second cousins because they share the same great-grandparents: Thomas and Edith Pelletier.
…
Family records and local knowledge in Allagash identify them as the children of first cousins: Jackson’s mother, Colleen (O’Leary) McBreairty, and Pelletier’s father are first cousins through the Pelletier line that runs deep in the St. John Valley.
That makes the couple second cousins by blood — close enough for small-town knowing glances, distant enough that the law and biology shrug.
Read more here.
###