Barack Obama and Brad Pitt Are Cousins? YUP! - Page 2

Author: Tech Team
Published: June 05, 2009 at 2:58 pm

Move over, Google. Another Web outfit is digitizing millions of documents and making them available online.
That site is Ancestry.com, and its parent company is racking up nearly $200 million a year charging people to peruse scanned family-history documents--things like birth and marriage records, but also more obscure databases like immigration records and draft-registration cards.

One tactic is using its team of in-house genealogy researchers to find interesting family links between celebrities, royalty and politicians. Some recent discoveries include genealogical links between Barack Obama and Brad Pitt, Sarah Palin and Franklin Roosevelt, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Genealogist Anastasia Tyler, who has done some of the celebrity work for Ancestry.com, says it's easiest to find common ties among people who have deep roots in the United States or in the British royal family. For celebrities and regular folk, most of the best family records date from 1850 to 1930. Before 1850, records were scarcer. After 1930, detailed records become tougher to find because of privacy concerns, Tyler says.

One particularly rich mine for family-history buffs are World War I and World War II draft registration cards, she adds. In 1917 and 1918 alone, about 24 million U.S. men registered for the draft--meaning researchers are very likely to find a hit scouring World War I records for a male relative who was of draftable age at that time.

Another thing the article said which I do NOT agree with:

Sometimes those records even yield dirt on a celebrity. According to Tyler, Tom Cruise's great grandfather was described as "short, stout and bald" on his draft card. Guess the apple fell pretty far from that tree."

Excuse me? The apple fell far from the tree?

Tom IS short, and he IS starting to bald, AND perhaps if it wasn't for Scientology's dangerous and kooky Purification Rundown of ingesting niacin vitamin bombs and oil, I think Cruise would still have that spare tire he picked up after marrying his child bride/fembot.

Besides when he played Les Grossman, in Tropic Thunder, the picture below could be alternate future for our boy Cruise. Time can be cruel Tom. Seems like the apples are a little bit more in reach now? (Of course nothing that some nips and tucks and fasting can't take care of, right Tom? wink wink)

cruise11