The Road not Taken
I mentioned last week that I would check to see if I was related to Robert Frost or Robert Burns. I meant it as a joke, but as the week progressed, I decided I would follow up on the idea, including another couple of famous poets, W.B. Yeats and John Keats while I was at it. As I've said before, if you broaden your search beyond direct ancestors -- your great and great-to-the-X grandparents, the chances you are related to someone famous multiply greatly, and some of the genealogy sites make the search pretty easy. Give them enough information to pinpoint the person you're looking for, click an icon, and voila, the information pops up. The program I use won't identify relations beyond 15 generations, but you can still go back pretty far. I ran the four men I cited above and found that our family is related to two of them -- Yeats, who married a 10th cousin, three times removed, and Frost, a 6th cousin, three times removed. I'll skip which side of the family is related ...