Page 6 - Cousins - Celebrities, Saints & Sinners

This is what makes Relative Finder so unusual. It has the potential to extend your genealogy
research even further into the past as well as expand the stories of your ancestor’s siblings as
they descend through the branches of their connected but unique family trees. The result – at
least in my case - was an impressive list of cousins who have impacted the human condition
through contributions in the arts, science, politics, business, sports and …. a few less savory
categories as well.

Hopefully, the family members and limited audience I prepared this for will be as interested as I
was to discover these hidden connections to, potentially, over 500 celebrities, saints and
sinners who have, somehow, undetected, managed to attach themselves to our extended
family tree. Here we find family connections that go back, in some instances, nearly 700 years
and up to 15 generations. The majority are from the United Kingdom and many of them
connect through ancestors who emigrated to Colonial America. These conditions tie smoothly
into the history of my own bloodline and I feel this contributes to why we can identify the
numbers of cousins that we see here. The more I looked over the family trees generated by the
Relative Finder application, the more believable many of them became. Again, before you
dismiss this as ridiculous, look at the writeup for Richard Warren under the “Mayflower
Pilgrims” category, where Wikipedia identifies a total of 23 prominent descendants of his
bloodline. See references 23 – 25 that support these relationships. If one man can father so
many notable personages, is it so difficult to believe that hundreds of more ancestors can’t
make similar contributions?

Some clarification before we get into the book. First, most of the personalities highlighted in this book
are cousins – as you could guess by the title. However, seven other blood relatives were also identified –
three great-grandfathers and four great-uncles. Two of these great-grandfathers are highlighted in
Chapter 1, Mayflower Pilgrims, and the remaining great-grandfather and great-uncles will be briefly
introduced in Chapter 14.

Second, a few words on how the chapters are organized. Each chapter identifies a category that best
describes how each of the cousins included came to prominence and are pretty much self-explanatory.
Most chapters will include full write ups on five or so cousins and more limited summaries on several
others. Those cousins with full writeups will also include an attached LDS-generated family tree that
identifies how they connect to me. Also included with be an LDS report that shows the names of all
cousins in that chapter to whom I am related.

Not all categories in this book are the same as those shown in the Relative Finder application. Two
categories – “Black Sheep” and “Old West” – are categories I added. The cousins highlighted in these
categories were included in the LDS category “Famous Americans” and you will see their names listed in
the ancestor report shown for that category.

As you will note, I did not do writeups on all the cousins listed in each category. The decision as to who
to highlight or not highlight was mine alone. All photos used are in the public domain. The family trees
and reports included in this book were generated after my last Family Search update on April 10, 2020.

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