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Genealogy's Star - Oh no! I'm First Cousins to William Shakespeare

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  • Genealogy's Star - Oh no! I'm First Cousins to William Shakespeare

    I was guessing I could use my relationship to William Shakespeare to explain the overwhelming popularity of my blog (just kidding). But, I doubt that the gene pool is sufficiently connected to account for the phenomena. Especially since Shakespeare would probably disown me. So how did I come to the startling knowledge of my 1st cousin (with a few generations removed) relationship to Willie Shakespeare (that's what we call him in the family)? It came as a results of my son's Relative Finder report on "European Royalty." So I decided to duplicate the results.

    Relative Finder is a both a website and Facebook online program that access portions of your family tree from New.FamilySearch.org. Interestingly, my family information in New.FamilySearch.org (NFS) is rather less than reliable. Also, NFS has some really questionable inclusions, such as the "One Royal Line" by Albert F. Schmuhl. When I clicked on finding my ancestors, the program came back with 7008 of my "relatives." I can hardly wait to add all of these individuals into my genealogy program!

    After selecting a famous relative, I chose Famous Writers and voila! I am a First Cousin to William Shakespeare 12 generations removed. Hmm. I was not aware that there was any agreement on Willie's genealogy. In fact, there is discussion that the ancestor through whom I am supposedly related may not be Willie's father at all but possibly his brother? See The Shakespeare Family History Site.

    So I began to look at the so-called relationship chart. Everything looks pretty normal back to David Kenyon (1693 Rhode Island) and his wife Mary Sanford (1703 Rhode Island) but here the plot thickens. Mary Sanford is shown as the daughter of William Sanford (1676 Rhode Island) and then Samuel Sanford (1635 Rhode Island) Whoops! Looks like he was either a Narragansett Indian or the line has drifted off course. Roger Williams settled in what became Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in 1636. Although Williams was not the first European settler in the area, Samuel Sanford is not mentioned as one of the few possible settlers before Williams.

    It is beginning to look mightily like this relationship thing is entirely bogus and it isn't even cleverly bogus. So now we get into a discussion about whether or not this (possibly fake) relationship calculator is a boon or a bane? My answer. Only if you actually believe that you are related to some of these famous people. It is possible that a relationship to someone less remote in time could be more accurate, but if the relationships are based on information in NFS I would have to reject the proposed relationship out of hand without adequate documentation.

    Will I go along with the argument that anything that gets people interested in their family is justified under the umbrella of "it doesn't hurt anyone, anyway." It would be OK if the program came out and said that this supposed relationship was pure fabrication, but it purports to dispense accurate information without any obvious disclaimers and people accept it on its face as true.

    Sorry, if this is a rehash of what everyone already knows, but I run into this problem of relationships of famous people regularly. How dare I cast aspersions on a BYU program.





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