Are you related to anyone famous?

[Skunk]

We aren't related in any way but my aunt used to date Garth Brooks in high school, so if that would've worked out he'd be my uncle.

[Mr. Morden]

Most of my ancestors immigrated to North America in the latter half of the 19th century.  However, ~5% of my ancestry traces to American colonists at the time of the Revolutionary War, mostly in New York.  (They were “Loyalists” and fled to Canada at the end of the war.)  The family stories only go back to about the time of the Revolutionary War, but if you go to these online genealogy pages, and search for the names and dates that I have, you can find people connecting my ancestors all the way back to the original Dutch colonists of New York (not yet called New York then) in the 1620s.  In fact, if you believe these folks, then I’m a direct descendant of Sarah Rapelje, the first European girl born in what’s now New York state:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Rapelje

According to that Wiki page, that also makes me a distant cousin of Humphrey Bogart.  You can find another ancestry line for my English ancestors that supposedly has a common ancestor with the Wright Brothers way back in 1500 or so.

And then there are the folks who claim to be able to take some of these ancestry lines all the way back to Charlemagne.  If you take this stuff seriously, then I have multiple paths of ancestry back to Charlemagne, at least one through my English ancestors and one through my Dutch ancestors.  This also takes you through various Counts of both Flanders and Holland, including Arnulf I of Flanders and Floris I of Holland.

[Hoosier_Nick]

Noah Webster, Benjamin Harrison, and Kurt/Kyle Bush. But all through different parts of my family (Paternal Grandfather, Paternal Grandmother, Maternal Grandmother).

[JA]

They're not really famous, but my maternal grandmother is a descendant of Reverend Philip Ludwig Boehm, Reverend John Philip Boehm, Philip Ludwig Boehm, and Adam Deshler. Reverend John Philip Boehm established the German Reformed Church in the United States (now the Reformed Church in the United States, but the majority of congregants joined today's United Church of Christ). Adam Deshler established Fort Deshler (still exists as a historical site) to protect settlers from Native American attacks. Philip Ludwig Boehm was a Lieutenant Colonel in the American Revolutionary War.

[Mr. Morden]

Btw, this is interesting:

https://isogg.org/wiki/Cousin_statistics

Going by the number of distant cousins one would expect to have from each generation, you're probably looking at most people here having tens of millions of other people alive today with whom you share a common ancestor born since, say 1600.  Some of them are surely famous people.  It's just that you don't know who they are, because no one is able to track a family tree with that many names on it.

[BuckeyeNut]

Related to the immediate past post, I'm a direct descendant of William Bradford. Through him I'm distantly related to a a whole list of famous people, including but not limited to Alec Baldwin, Julia Child, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve, William Rehnquist, Benjamin Spock, and Adlai Stevenson.

[AppleJackass]

Manfred von Richthofen

[ilikeverin]

As Mr. Morden suggested, probably a lot of people.  Including a lot of famous Americans since some of my family goes back in the US to the 1600s.

As far as people I know of, though, I am directly descended from Thomas Mayhew, whose son (also my direct ancestor) Gully once wrote a thesis about (in part).  I am a distant cousin of James Longstreet, back when our ancestors lived in New Netherlands.  And a distant half-cousin of mine (we are directly descended from a shared male ancestor, but the woman who is my ancestor died before he married the woman who is his ancestor) ran for House in Arkansas a couple years back, but lost in the Democratic primary.

[Sir John Johns]

IIRC what my mother told me, I'm a descendant of Swiss/French revolutionary Étienne Clavière.

[Kingpoleon]

Most notably, I'm believed to be a descendant of Tsar Nicholas I. Does that count?

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Spencer Compton, Earl of Wilmington is the only person of note that my great-uncle traced when he did the family genealogy. He actually wrote out a very detailed and far-reaching family tree, far, far, far more advanced than most families, and he did it before the interwebs.

I'm apparently a cousin of Elvis somehow but I've seen no actual genealogy proving that (he'd be like my fifth cousin anyway). My grandmother and her sisters refer to him as "cousin Elvis," but its more of a joke. They were and are yuge fans.