Fame in Your Family?
The morning was not unlike other mornings that Adele Marcum had spent with her grandmother. Together, they worked in the kitchen creating homemade bread, while Adele’s grandmother regaled her with stories about their ancestors. But this time their conversation would lead to a special discovery—a famous ancestor in their family tree.
It started when Adele’s grandmother pulled out genealogy papers she wanted to give Adele. Adele spotted a familiar surname in one of the pedigree charts her grandmother handed her—Ritchie/Richie/Richey. The name was fresh in Adele’s mind. She had just seen it on another family tree she had researched—Davy Crockett’s.
As a professional genealogist, Adele had researched more than 200 famous family trees and had just completed research on Davy Crockett. On a hunch that the familiar surname in her family tree belonged to the same ancestor in Davy Crockett’s tree, Adele hit the books again, and sure enough, the surname belonged to the same person in both lines. The connection? Adele’s father’s mother’s mother’s mother—four generations back.
You, too, might be able to find a famous person or two in your family tree, but be forewarned, it takes a magic combination of luck and research.
Start your search by gabbing with the family. Write down any celebrities mentioned as possible relations. Pick the most likely celebrity relations—like celebs from the same geographic areas as your ancestors—to research for possible connections.
Next, see if any of your most-likely relations have family trees that have been researched and shared by other people. Part of the reason Adele was able to find her Davy Crockett connection so quickly was because her grandmother already had a lot of the research done. Plus Adele had just finished researching Davy Crockett’s family line.
Expect to go back several generations on both your family tree and the celebrity’s. “For me, these epiphanies usually come after researching multiple generations back on several famous trees,” says Adele. And don’t be discouraged when it doesn’t work out as you hoped.
With 64 potential parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so forth in only six generations of your family tree, plus countless aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and cousins, the odds keep getting better that somehow, somewhere, you’ll eventually make a surprisingly famous connection.
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my aunt Nancy and cousins Jeffrey and Jamie are direct decendents of Davy Crockett.
her father was a country doctor, i think his first name was Stanley as was his father. Stanley? Crockett the first had a wife named Birdie. they lived in Lafayett ( Tippecanoe Co. ) Indiana.
Dr Stanley Crockett Sr.’s father had the name Patton as a middle name.
my uncle Jim ( James Ince ) is my aunt Nancy’s husband.
my grandmother’s last name was English. someone in the English family also married a Crockett.
the Ince family also goes way back. Anglo Saxon and the family dates back to before the Norman Conquest. although not everyone with the last name Ince ( or variations ) is related to us. some with that last name were simply adopted the last name because they lived in Ince England.
Ince also during the reign of king Henry the VIII, remained staunch catholics, and there was some research some 20 yrs ago of what was called “priest holes” which were dug below basement level to hide priests facing persecution.
and something about an abbey and the Blundell-Ince Hall having a secret passageway to sheild priest facing persecution.
my aunt Therese did a lot of research in the 1940’s, but i was born after she died and my father and his siblings were not to interested in family history.
what got me interested in asking questions, is back in the 1960’s, my dad and his brother Jim got letters from the Brittish government notifing the the were heirs to the Ince castle ( aparently the brittish gov. did not want to carry the costs of maintaning the castle ) - they were male heirs with male sons - and if only they paid the back taxes ( what do centuries of back taxes amount to?
) the castle could be thiers.
having established themselves state-side, and drafty castles are a bit costly to heat, they declined. but were amused.
Carolyn