Connecting to fame

So last month I got an email from FamilySearch.org that they were rolling out a new Famous Relatives page.  It shows famous historical figures that connect to my tree in some way, usually a distant cousin.  I finally had some time to check it out today and, wow, there are a lot of connections.  My maternal line connects back to quite a lot of people; I need to add more connections on my father's side to see how this list grows.  What they've connected for me so far includes:

• Leaders
• James Madison (4th cousin, 9 times removed)
• George Washington (5th c, 9 r)
• John Quincy Adams (5th c, 6 r)
• Millard Fillmore (6th c, 4 r)
• Ulysses S. Grant (6th c, 6 r)
• William Henry Harrison (6th c, 6 r)
• Calvin Coolidge (6th c, 5 r)
• Rutherford B. Hayes (6th c, 5 r)
• Abraham Lincoln (6th c, 6 r)
• James Garfield (7th c, 4 r)
• Theodore Roosevelt (7th c, 3 r)
• Benjamin Harrison (7th c, 4 r)
• Franklin D. Roosevelt (7th c, 5 r)
• James K. Polk (8th c, 5 r)
• Richard Nixon (8th c, 1 r)
• William Howard Taft (8th c, 3 r)
• Thomas Jefferson (6th c, 8 r)
• Zachary Taylor (8th c, 6 r)
• Warren G. Harding (9th c, 1 r)
• Lyndon B. Johnson (9th c, 2 r)
• Diana, Princess of Wales (10th c)
• Franklin Pierce (8th c, 4 r)
• William McKinley (9th c, 3 r)
• Herbert Hoover (10th c, 2 r)
• John Tyler (8th c, 5 r)
• Winston Churchill (6th c, 2 r) (I wrote about this earlier)
  
• Harry Truman (11th c)
• Inventors and scientists
• Isaac Newton (4th cousin, 9 times removed)
• Eli Whitney (5th c, 8 r)
• Thomas Edison (5th c, 4 r) 
• Edward Jenner (6th c, 8 r)
• Wilbur and Orville Wright (both are 7th c, 3 r)
• Philo T. Farnsworth (8th c, 2 r)
• Charles Darwin (8th c, 4 r)
• Samuel Morse (8th c, 4 r)
• Jonathan Browning (6th c, 6 r)
• John Browning (7th c, 5 r)
  
• Robert B. Ingebretsen (9th c, 1 r)
• Alexander Graham Bell (11th c, 2 r)
• Entertainers and artists
• Henry David Thoreau (5th cousin, six times removed)
• Emily Dickinson (6th c, 4 r)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne (6th c, 5 r)
• Walt Disney (7th c, 4 r)
• Buffalo Bill (7th c, 3 r)
• John Wayne (7th c, 2 r)
• Shirley Temple (7th c, 3 r)
• Mark Twain (9th c, 3 r)
• Bing Crosby (8th c, 2 r)
• T. S. Eliot (8th c, 3 r)
• Cecil B. DeMille (8th c, 2 r)
• Marilyn Monroe (8th c, 2 r)
• Lucille Ball (9th c)
• Katharine Hepburn (9th c, 2 r)
• Agatha Christie (9th c, 2 r)
• Buster Keaton (9th c, 2 r)
• Elvis Presley (6th c, 3 r)
• Jackson Pollock (9th c, 2 r)
• Robert Louis Stevenson (11th c, 2 r)
• Edgar Allan Poe (12th c, 1 r)
• Audrey Hepburn (13th c, 1 r)
• Trailblazers
• Elizabeth Tilley (Mayflower passenger; 11th great grandmother)
• John Howland (Mayflower passenger; 11th great grandfather)
• John Tilley (Mayflower passenger; 12th great grandfather)
• Joan Hurst (Mayflower passenger; 12th great grandmother)
• Richard More (Mayflower passenger; 1st cousin, 13 times removed)
• Ellen More (Mayflower passenger; 1st c, 13 r)
• Jasper More (Mayflower passenger; 1st c, 13 r)
• Mary More (Mayflower passenger; 1st c, 13 r)
• Ann Franklin (first female newspaper editor; 5th c, 9 r)
• Amelia Earhart (7th c, 1 r)
• Helen Keller (8th c, 1 r)
• Florence Nightingale (11th c, 3 r)
• Robert Peary (11th c, 3 r)
• Robert Baden-Powell (12th c, 1 r) 

... and one athlete: Gordie Howe (12th cousin, once removed).

I had known about Winston Churchill already, but the list there showed a different lineage than I knew, so there is definitely more research to be done there.  And, with a few family members who worked for Disney in the 1940s, it's cool to see that Walt was actually a cousin.  However, the most surprising to me is that, according to FamilySearch, I'm a Mayflower descendant!

I know where I'm gonna be looking next....

Probably not a royal connection, but Prime Minister...

When I started doing genealogy research, I got a postcard from one of my relatives suggesting that there might be a connection to Mary, Queen of Scots.  For the entire time that I had known of this family legend, I thought it was a bit too unlikely to possibly be true.  After all, I had only this one postcard to go on for this story, and I haven't seen anything in the rest of my research that might suggest a connection.  So I haven't really tried to prove this connection with very much vigor at all.  The closest that I've seen was in the 1925 history of Alexander Meharry's descendants, where it mentions that the Meharry line emigrated from Scotland to America as a way to flee religious persecution during her reign.  It may not be as glamorous a connection as a blood relationship, but this is one explanation that I can believe.

However, in looking around on a different topic this week, I found many resources that show a probable blood connection to another very well known British leader.  He wasn't an ancestor, but turns out to be a cousin.  Sir Winston Churchill (b. 30 November 1874; d. 24 January 1965), Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the 1940s and 1950s, was descended from Mehitabel Beach (b. 1749; d. 1807), who connects into my Beach line through her great, great grandfather, John Beach (b. 1621; d. 6 November 1677).  John was the first of the Beach line to live in North America, and making the leap back to the British Isles has proven very difficult for a number of researchers.  I'm still digesting the assertions and trying to fit various people into my lines.  So now I have another avenue to research in proving my distant Beach relations.