Marilyn Monroe was my cousin

I've always been interested in genealogy.

My mother comes from a family of 16 kids (one father/two mothers).

My father died when I was eight and I don't know a lot about his family.

Back in the mid 1990s, one of my mother's brothers had given me a lot of information about our ancestors and I inputted it into a program to keep track of it. Then life happened and I got distracted.

I recently got back into it and signed up to Ancestry.ca on Friday. Very quickly I've been able to track my family (both on my mother and father's side) back to the mid 1660s. Amazing!

I remember my father's sister about ten years ago telling me that we were cousins somehow with Marilyn Monroe through her first husband, James Dougherty. With very little info to go on, I determined this afternoon that she was my first cousin-in-law twice removed. My great grandmother and Marilyn's former father-in-law were sister and brother. Yes, it's a stretch and they'd divorced way before I was born but it was fun to figure it out.

Are you into genealogy?