Thursday, August 28, 2008

More Famous Kin

Several months ago I browsed through Gary Boyd Roberts' Ancestries of American Presidents.
Gary Boyd Roberts is an American Geenalogist known for his scholarship in Americans of royal descent, the ancestors of American presidents, and notable kin. Roberts is the retired Senior Research Scholar of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS). (Wikipedia)
Today I discovered this article he wrote: Notable Descendants of the Immigrant Stoughton Siblings of Massachusetts

This provides some documentation to extend the ancestry of Joanna Chamberlain (mentioned a couple posts ago) a couple more generations back, and provides an extensive list of cousins. In this article Roberts doesn't provide detailed genealogies, but does provide a long list of names filled with fun. (And maybe, since Roberts himself is a descendant, I'll be able to find some more detailed charts in one of his books.)

While I insist I am more interested in other genealogical pursuits, I can't deny that it is fun to find out I am distant cousins with all of these individuals. A personal genealogy page at FamilyTreeMaker Online has a detailed descent chart, with even more names. It quotes the Gary Boyd Roberts article, but I'm not certain where the details come from, so I can't be as confident with the information.

Here's a selection of Stoughton descendants according to the sources above.

Presidents
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Ulysses Simpson Grant

Other Political
Mitt Romney
George Romney
John Kerry
Patrick Buchanan
Adlai Stevenson III (son of Presidential contender)
John Foster Dulles
Thomas Dewey
Pierre Dupont IV
Hamilton Fish

Actors
Matthew Langford Perry (Chandler, Friends)
William Christopher (Father Mulcahy, M*A*S*H)
Kyra Sedgwick (Brenda Johnson, The Closer)
James Osgood Perkins (Johnny Lovo, Scarface)
Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates, Psycho)
Osgood Robert Perkins (Young Norman, Psycho II)
Cary Elwes (Westley, Princess Bride)
Ann Bradford Davis (Alice, The Brady Bunch)
Clint Eastwood (Harry Callahan, Dirty Harry)
Barbara Babcock (Dorothy Jennings, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
Tuesday Weld (Thalia Menninger, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis)
Shirley Temple (Marthy Jane, Little Miss Marker)
Robert Bushnell Ryan (John Claggart, Billy Budd)
Debbie Reynolds (Kathy Selden, Singin in the Rain)
Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia, Star Wars)
Thomas Edward Hulce (W.A. Mozart, Amadeus)
Patrick Swayze (Johnny Castle, Dirty Dancing)
William Holden (David Larrabee, Sabrina)
Jane Wyatt (Margaret Anderson, Father Knows Best)
Viggio Peter Mortensen, Jr. (Aragorn, The Lord of the Rings)
Ashley Judd (Linda Porter, De-Lovely)
Amanda Peet (Jack Barrett, Jack and Jill)
Margaret Sullavan (Patricia Hollmann, Three Comrades)
Fred Rogers (Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood)
Malcolm Atterbury (Al Malone, The Birds)
Lillian Gish (Elsie Stoneman, Birth of A Nation)
Dorothy Gish (Nell Gwyn, Nell Gwynne)
Ralph Bellamy (FDR, The Winds of War & War and Remembrance)

Poets, Artists, Novelists
Hart Crane
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Orson Scott Card

Other
Benedict Arnold
Alfred Kinsey

Anyone should be satisfied with this list of cousins, so now I can focus my genealogical attention elsewhere.

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