Lately, my inbox — and my FamilySearch app — have been buzzing with a new kind of excitement. Not only can you see which cousins showed up at RootsTech, but suddenly FamilySearch is also telling me I’m related to Steve Young, Jane Austen, Walt Disney, and half the U.S. presidents.
At this rate, I’m expecting Charlemagne to send me a friend request.
And honestly? I get it. I’ve met plenty of people over the years who proudly unroll a giant chart tracing their line back to Charlemagne, Eleanor of Aquitaine, or some medieval noble. They beam. They glow. They point to the laminated crest like they’ve just unlocked a secret level of humanity.
And in my mind I think:
“You and everybody else.”
But I let them enjoy their moment.
Because here’s the truth — and it’s actually kind of wonderful.
Once you go back far enough, the human family tree stops looking like a tree and starts looking like a bowl of spaghetti. By the time you hit 8th, 9th, 10th cousins, you have thousands of relatives. Tens of thousands. Maybe more. Statistically, almost everyone with European ancestry shares ancestors from that medieval era.
So when FamilySearch tells me I’m Steve Young’s 10th cousin, or that Jane Austen and I share a great‑great‑great‑great‑something, it’s not a scam. It’s not a marketing trick. It’s just math.
Messy, beautiful, interconnected math.
But here’s the part that matters:
Those distant connections don’t make us special.
They make us related.
And that brings me back to our favorite question here at Heycuz:
How do you relate?
Not to celebrities.
Not to kings.
Not to the glossy names on a screen.
But to each other.
Because the real magic isn’t that I’m 10th cousins with a football legend or 8th cousins with a poet. The magic is that somewhere, in the tangle of centuries, our families touched. Our stories crossed. Our ancestors stood on the same soil, breathed the same air, survived the same storms.
And now here we are — still connecting, still comparing notes, still asking the same question:
How do you relate?
Whether your line leads to Charlemagne, a coal miner, a midwife, or a mystery, you belong in this family.
And that’s worth more than any celebrity cousin list.
