Yes…but WHY?
lthough my "Famous Cousins" page has been one of the more popular\visited pages
at my Web site, and I have received a fair amount of positive e-mail feedback about it, some
may ask why I display such a page or continue to add to it. Am I
boasting about having such (minutely-related) famous relatives?
Absolutely not. In fact, just about ANYONE could, given the time and inclination, do the same and find as many or more such notable relations. See my Odds of Being Related page for some statistics of such a likehood.
The Famous Cousins page is just really my solved puzzle page. Some people enjoy crosswords, others Sudoku. My wife enjoys a variety of clue/search.mystery-online games. As an idle pastime, I enjoy linking my family genealogy with common ancestors with various celebrities or royal genealogies. It's much like a crossword or Sudoku puzzle, in that I start with a name here, a name there, and look for clues as to how to fill in the gaps. Since both celebrities and royals often have published genealogies on the Internet, it is easy to find those, scan them for potentially related surnames, and then to start connecting the dots.
There are, of course, as many such “puzzles” for which I fail (sometimes quickly) to find any relation whatsoever. More often than not, even for those I complete, the relation is distant enough that referring to one of these individuals as a famous “cousin” is used quite tongue-in cheek. The saying “We are all related” is undoubtedly true, if one can successfully trace the descent of just about any two living individuals back far enough on both sides. The Famous Cousins pages just go to illustrate such a point.
"Famous Cousins" is all just for fun (like using the diamond-studded A on this page), and no other motivation than entertainment should be attributed to these particular pages.The preponderance of such celebrity genealogies on the Internet attests to the shared enjoyment by others of finding such connections, so I share mine, just in case you find a common link.
You should note that just because I show these people as related to my Marcotte branch (i.e.- descendants of Joseph Marcotte and Mary Lena Moisant) or likewise to my mother's Baggett ancestry, or to my spouse's Staples barnch, that not all Marcottes, Baggetts or Staples share necessarily share that same relation, or potentially have any relation, at all. Since most French-Canadians descend from a very small number of early-1600s French colonists, it is probable that many or even most of these lineages overalp at some point with early common ancestors in most other French Canadians' genealogies, but that's a puzzle for you to work out, yourself.