The phrase "a distant connection of" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a relationship or link that is not close or direct, often in contexts involving family, ideas, or concepts.
Example: "Although they had never met, she felt a distant connection of shared heritage with her ancestors."
Alternatives: "a remote relation of" or "an indirect link to".
He made the acquaintance of Giovanni Ruccellai, Lattanzio Tolomei, and Jacopo Sannazzaro; he met the illustrious Vittoria Colonna, a distant connection of his family, and in her house he probably talked with Cardinal Pietro Bembo and Ariosto.
Those mentioned in despatches – who, entre nous, sound pretty upper-class to begin with – are Samantha Cameron, apparently a distant connection of Charles II's mistress Nell Gwyn, and the Mayor of London, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who is a direct descendant of George II.
The backers of the new location hinted strongly of a distant connection to the Ohio River, the great natural conduit into the interior of North America, and ultimately to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.
Her music has that insubstantial, ineffable quality: it is R&B abstracted, rarefied, sublimated, with static, glitches and clicks to offer a sense of future-music with a distant connection to some long-lost past; many of her tracks appear to have sampled the sort of symphonic soul featured in this Guardian Music 10 of the best from 29 April.
"But I like the idea of taking something I have such a distant connection to and finding out more about it.
William Thomas Lyttleton was born in 1786 in England; he was a distant connection to those owning Hagley Hall in Worcestershire, England.
American sports fans will find a distant connection between smash-mouth as a description of especially brutal football and gobsmacked, but the violence in the latter is purely figurative.
What does deserve scorn, though, is the academic culture in which an extremely distant connection to a Cherokee ancestor ends up being touted by a law school as proof of its commitment to diversity.
A continuation of these studies on human chromosomes 21 and 22 found a wealth of distant connections that span megabases of genomic space [ 2].
Eleanor Clarke, Chorleywood, Herts I bought The Fly in the Cathedral by Brian Cathcart after reading a Guardian review, chiefly because of a distant family connection - my mother taught mathematics to the 10-year old Ernest Walton, the pioneer atomic scientist whose work with John Cockcroft is described in the book.
The mayor all but accused the chairman, Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., of collusion with City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, even noting a distant family connection (a Miller great-grandmother was a sister of a Schwarz grandmother).
