My great-aunt, Mary McDougal Axelson, was a screenwriter and playwright in the 1930s and 1940s. Her big hit was a movie called A Child Is Born.
My cousin, Dale Pelton, is an art director who worked on the original Battlestar Galactica pilot, on The Goonies, and (to his eternal embarrassment, I suspect) on Return of the Living Dead, Part II.
My cousin, Elizabeth Patterson, was a character actress whose lengthy career included the recurring role of Mrs. Trumbull, the babysitter for Little Ricky on I Love Lucy.
If you take it about 4 generations back, my mother’s family tree intersects with that of the Kennedy Family. According to what my Grandmother once told me, anyway. At the time, I was very impressed to be a distant cousin to JFK.
He played the lead – by far the biggest and most important character – in the 1982 miniseries The Blue and the Gray. The entire story revolved around his character, John Geyser. Here’s an excerpt from an extensive review:
My step-great-grandfather’s cousin was Two-Gun Nan, a sharpshooter cowgirl type in one of the Wild West shows (can’t remember if it was Buffalo Bill or the other one). She was the first woman to cross the continental US alone (on horseback, in 1910). That’s pretty much it.
Wow! My family doesn’t have reunions though, maybe we should start one.
I have never met anyone I was related too before, my family is tiny, at least I always thought so… Same here about the school thing, they called me outlaw for the entire sixth grade year.
Yeah! The “Outlaw Family Reunion” We could play “Pin the Bullet on the Back of the Innocent Woman!” We could play “Great Train Robbery!” We could fight about who gets to be Jesse, Frank, and Quantrill. This is gonna be fun.
Not related, but my mother went to high school with Jeffrey Hunter, who played Capt. Christopher Pike in the first Star Trek pilot episode.
There does exist an extensive genealogy on my father’s family, so I’m starting to notice that I’m related to all sorts of people who have glommed onto it in the course of researching their own genealogies. If I google the name of the original ancestor who immigrated from Holland in the 1600s, I’ll find links to the genealogies of families I never heard of. I haven’t found anyone who’s truly famous, though I did once see in one of these genealogies that I’m a fifth cousin once or twice removed of Grace Hopper, the inventor of COBOL.
Not related but my Grandma used to babysit Danny Thomas’ siblings and my Uncle, (her oldest child) used to play with Jamie Farr as they he lived next door. (Toledo, OH)
My Mom remembers a little about Farr but not much since she was so young.
Oh and my other Grandma learned how to play guitar from Mose Rager and she knew Merle Travis. (Muhlenberg County, KY)
Is **Winston Churchill **famous enough (I assume no link is necessary)?
I’m related to him on my maternal grandmother’s side. And if you were to seeing the Murray family, you would definitely see a resemblance.
[sub]Oh yeah, and Richard Grieco on my dad’s side. Whatever. I tend not to believe that, since my dad’s family is almost entirely of Irish descent.[/sub]
Yes. Within a fairly large circle my parents are/were fairly famous. But at present they are onto the stage of just lying about and playing golf for the next several decades to come.
We’re descended from “Evil Senator Stoneman” from Birth of a Nation. In fact, that became my nickname for a few weeks in highschool, after we had to watch the movie. I guess since he was the villain in a pro-KKK film it’s something to be proud of… In actuality, he was one of Sherman’s generals who became a US Senator known for being a carpetbagger.
I think we’re also supposed to be related to Will Stoneman from Iron Will, but there’s no one left on that side of the family who knows enough of our geneology to verify or refute that. Nonetheless, I suspect my brother slyly named my Number One Nephew to get him that “Iron Will” nickname.
When I was first told, I didn’t care. I then read about him, and cared slightly. I then doubted.
My Grandmother wrote to George Mson University as I was applying to colleges. This sounds stupid, but I was offered free tuition if i would have adopted “Mason” as my surname (aswas my Grandmother’s).
Actually, I just remembered the photo was of my great-grandfather standing with the Wright brothers, not my grandmother…hadn’t thought of that picture in years, and wish it hadn’t been lost - would be a fun thing to have now.
Went to school with a famous scientologist thespian. (Never thought he was gay)
My father had regular meetings with Nixon, Ford, and Carter because of his job.
As a kid, I used to ride my bike to play video games at the student center of a local college. If memory serves, ‘galaxians’ was playing too loudly and a long-haired jerk playing pool decided to play tough-guy and chase me out with a pool-cue. He looked an awful lot like Bruce Willis, but with long scraggly hair. I learned later that in fact he did attend there at the time. (I often wondered what would I do if we saw each other & he remembered me. These days I’m a tad bigger, better skilled, and yes, he’d need the pool cue just to call it a ‘fair fight’.)
