# Do you know of any odd family/trees or marital relationships of famous people?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-know-of-any-odd-family-trees-or-marital-relationships-of-famous-people/446759>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [April 24, 2008, 11:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-know-of-any-odd-family-trees-or-marital-relationships-of-famous-people/446759 "2008-04-24T23:04:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\
**Post date:** [May 2, 2008, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-know-of-any-odd-family-trees-or-marital-relationships-of-famous-people/446759/21 "2008-05-02T00:44:35Z")

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[QUOTE=benbo1]  
pedigree collapse:  
[http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2\_083b.html](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_083b.html)

Embarrassed to say :eek: , but there are 2 pairs of 2nd cousins in my family - 1 from Mom, 1 from Dad. Thankfully, Mom & Dad ain’t even close to being related [other than by marriage 🙂]  
[/QUOTE]

mrAru and I joke about being related - we have the same coloring, similar bone structure .. his family has been in country since the very early 1700s, and mine has been here since the 1600s, and both lines were in New York City in the 100 years surrounding the revolutionary war. We figure that with the large families that our forebearers popped out, and being roughly of the same social class, there stands a very good chance that there was some sort of intermarriage going on at some point. I have a rather huge and exhaustive geneology that my grandmother and one of her sister in laws had been working on and if I ever get seriously bored and locked in a room with the bookcase of diaries and other crap I might just check and see 😉

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**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\
**Post date:** [May 2, 2008, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-know-of-any-odd-family-trees-or-marital-relationships-of-famous-people/446759/22 "2008-05-02T01:28:49Z")

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[QUOTE=Fir na tine]  
I tracked my wifes family back through the Revolutionary War - they were Tories and ended up going to Canada. Returned to the USA after 50 years or so.  
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Which to me is actually a lot more interesting. Nothing against Cherokees, but one of the fascinations of genealogy to me is how events 230 years ago affected where _you yourself_ (or in this case your wife) was born; I’m in America in part because of a 17th century Linen and Wool Act that I’d never heard of and wouldn’t have cared about if I had. There’s a quote I love from a book that (to me anyway) is almost unreadable- Thomas Wolfe’s _Look Homeward Angel_:

> [@](#):
>
> Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas. . . . The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.

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