M – Breaking news: Angelina Jolie is my 10th cousin. That explains a lot. She got all the looks the family. The rest of us caught a few crumbs from the genetic cup cake while Angelina got the cherry.
Imagine my surprise when I received this information on the subscription genealogy web site, Geni.com: “Angelina Jolie is Michael Morin’s 10th cousin.” I read those words again as the color left my face. I finally regained my composure to become quite philosophical about the possibilities.
Grasping for any straw that would validate us as blood relatives, I pulled up cousin Ang’s Geni.com profile to find her heritage is German, Slovak, Iroquois and French-Canadian. Ding ding ding. We have a winner. I am part French-Canadian. Close enough for me.
I’m not sure how many other people got the you’re-related-to-Angelina-Jolie notification, but I hope my cousin is getting a piece of the action. Now that I think of it, my late, Great-Grandfather Feyes used to tell me that, as a child in France, he and other children would get to sit on the lap of writer Victor Hugo who penned Les Miserables. I’m guessing that story, true or not, was passed around the family a lot when I was a kid.
Even Ellen got in on the celebrity spoofing action recently when she told guest Reese Witherspoon that she was related to Kate Middleton. Witherspoon wasn’t buying it. I’m not sure Ang is my 10th cousin but I can tell my great grandkids about it some day. “You know kids, back in 2002, Angelina Jolie sat on Grampy Mike’s lap…”
I’d better get my birth certificate out of mothballs just in case Donald Trump asks me for proof.
