I’m a direct descendant of Sir Thomas Digges, an early devotee of the Copernican system, and the first to propose that the stars were not located in a fixed shell around the earth, but had varying distances.
Francis Scott Key
By extension, you’re also related to F. Scott Fitzgerald
Louis “Lepke” Buchalter was related by marriage on my mother’s side.
After retirement I caught the genealogy bug and have [del]inexplicably wasted[/del] delighted in many 100’s of hobbying hours. I have a few 19th-century ancestors who have a very tiny amount of fame (e.g. Internet mentions) but to get to anyone who’d be familiar to even 1% of the population I’d have to go back to Alfred the Great or Charlemagne. Interestingly, my most prominent g-g- grandfather is a dead end: I’m pretty sure he was adopted in circumstances he chose to conceal from his biographers.
All Europeans are descended from Charlemagne. Having a detailed confirmed line of descent is more difficult, but still very common. Of course one mustn’t take Internet genealogies at face value – if they were correct I’d have several descents from Henry VIII (all via his bastards).
I am 6th-cousin with Brad Pitt. (As a very VERY rough estimate, an individual has on average about 10 1st cousins, 50 2nd cousins, 250 3rd cousins, 1200 4th cousins, 6000 5th cousins, 30000 6th cousins. I don’t know whether this statistic makes my relation to Mr. Pitt more or less impressive. :rolleyes: )
The one very tenuous claim to fame that I am aware of is a very tenuous relationship to Nikola Tesla. Apparently one of his aunts married into my paternal line. As it happens we share a first name, but entirely coincidentally.
A while back my mom was on a genealogy kick. The only one I can remember her telling me about is Benedict Arnold. Not an ancestor to be proud of.
I’m a bit of an oddball in that I started in genealogy when I was relatively young, about 25 years ago. But, I’m a database guy, and this sort of thing naturally appeals to me.
My ancestors include Mayflower passengers Richard Warren and William Brewster; poor Mary Towne, hanged as a witch during the Salem witch hunt, and like so many millions of others, royalty of Europe (King Henry II, among many others).
My cousins include Franklin Delano Roosevelt (through Lt. Jonathan Delano and Mercy Warren), Ulysses S. Grant (through Capt. Jonathan Delano and Amy Allen Hatch) and Sir Winston Churchill (and Diana Spencer) (through Joseph Hatch and Amy Allen), not to mention a more contemporary cousin Patrick Joseph Kennedy II (through Isaac Estey and Abigail Kimball).
My database is online, if anyone wants to compare lines/notes.
Horse thieves, hookers and peasant farmers, the lot of them. It’s on the backs of my family that all you hoity-toity Exploiters of the Working Class got where you are.
Charlemagne. But this means a specific traced line back to him (presumeably among billions of untraced lines). There is a famous genealogist who traced herself back to him, and I had the good luck to find her in my own tree.
Just depends which side of the 49th you live on. 
I went to school with a descendant of his (some of the Arnold family emigrated north as part of the Loyalist movement).
Captain John James Cook on moms side.
Supposedly, my matrilineal line includes meatpacker Samuel Wilson, known as “Uncle Sam”.
StG
Well, howdy cousin, because I was also supposedly descended on my mother’s side from “Uncle Sam.”
Mayflower passenger John Billington and Alexander Graham Bell.
My mothers family can trace their ancestry back to Granville Sharp the famous abolitionist.
What is cool is while researching the link we found a family tree the Sharps had put together tracing their ancestry back to Richard Grenville a British naval commander made famous by one of Alfred Lord Tennyson poems.
Howdy, cousin. I’m also a descendent of Brewster, and also of William Bradford.
I’m also related to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, William Henry Harrison, Benjamin Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, FDR, Richard Nixon, and the Bush clan. For Declaration signers: Carter Braxton, Button Gwinnett, Francis Lightfoot and Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Nelson, Robert Treat Paine, Roger Sherman, and Thomas Stone. Mind you, these are cousinly relationships, not direct line ancestors.
Also descended from King Henry I Plantagenet (and across the channel to France, of course), Henry III, and Edward I of England
Wyatt Earp
Being played by the same actor does not make you actually related 
We’ve done this thread before. But Sir Humphrey Gilbert, discoverer of Newfoundland and half-brother (through their mother) to Sir Walter Raleigh. The male descendants – my ancestors – extended all the way to the 19th century, when a Gilbert daughter married my great-grandfather. My grandfather and father both were given Gilbert as a middle name. Sir Humphrey received his knighthood from slaughtering the godless Irish. I even read a New York Times piece on him that claimed he had lined the path to his tent with the skulls of those he had ordered hanged.
I have his name squirreled away in my records somewhere, but I am also descended from a retired ethnic-Irish British admiral who was apparently the richest man in New York at one point in the early 18th century. (Alas! His riches did not make it down to me.) His daughter married the Gilbert on the farm next door in what is now, I think, Greenwich Village.