Who Would Have Guessed?
Talk about skeletons rattling around in closets. If you look long enough and far enough, you'll find that someone is related to someone else, that nobody wants to admit to! While there are those who take great pride in their lineage, others are busy nailing up the closet door. The family trees of famous people are no less prone to the quirks and oddities of chance than anyone else. Here are a few notable relationships that you can name-drop into a conversation:
- Humphrey Bogart, the suave, devil-may-care leading man of the American cinema, was a seventh cousin of Diana, Princess of Wales, through her U.S. relatives.
- Two of Britain's ex-Prime Ministers are fifth cousins, who share a living relative. John Major and Margaret Thatcher are both descended from a farming couple, John and Elizabeth Crust. The common relative is a singer, and composer of country songs, whose name is Geoffrey Crust.
- John Adams (1735-1826) was an intelligent and thoughtful man, more philosopher than politician. A Harvard-taught lawyer, he became frustrated by his two terms as vice-president. As he noted to his wife ""My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." But Adams would succeed to the presidency, and during his long political career, he took along his son as private secretary and aide de camp. That son would eventually become the first offspring of a president, to be elected to the same office when John Quincy Adams became the U.S.'s 6th president.
- In 2001, three families in Europe and North America, obtained permission to exhume the remains of an unidentified adult man and woman, as well as the grave of a toddler, recorded on a marker as "the unknown child", all of whom died in the sinking of the Titanic. One family believed the woman was their grandmother. But conditions in the ground had left no testable remains of the adults. And in the child's grave, only a 6cm piece of bone and three teeth remained. Dentin was discovered on one tooth, from which mitochondrial DNA was extracted, and compared to descendants of the children known to have died on the Titanic, who were the appropriate age. Surprisingly they came up with two matches, a child of 19 months from England, and one of 13 months from Finland. In 2004, identity of the unknown child was finally made. It was the remains of Eino Pannula, famous only because of the nature of his death, his name just one of over a thousand, on a list of the dead. His remains, two teeth and a bone fragment, were reinterred.
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