AI-generated image of the “shiny object ancestor” experience
When I recently delved into Taylor Swift’s roots, I made mention of a phenomenon I refer to as “shiny object ancestor.” And while it was just a passing remark, it resonated with a number of fellow genealogists who reached out to say that they knew exactly what I meant.
Whenever you research any family tree — your own or a complete stranger’s — there’s inevitably an ancestor (though it can also be a pair) who calls more loudly than the others. Anyone who’s experienced this will tell you that it’s almost as if they’re insisting on your attention.
This has happened to me countless times over my decades as a genealogist, so I decided to see if I could explain what it is that makes certain progenitors so irresistible. After a little mulling, I came up with a handful of factors that seem to be at play, and I’m curious whether others will agree.
Accidental discovery
Learning something that makes you do a double take, as often as not, results from tripping across a random tidbit in a newspaper, and this is the equivalent of an engraved invitation to dig deeper. In the case of Katy Perry, for instance, I spotted an article about a gold heist in 1859 San Francisco that featured members of her family. That caused me to follow the trail of her Irish immigrant great-great-grandmother, Anna “Hannah” Maria Mulhare, and reach the conclusion that she’s probably the one who wound up with the haul.
AI-generated version of Katy Perry’s great-great-grandmother, Hannah Mulhare
Similarly, with Barry Manilow, I stumbled across a piece about one of his grandfathers, Harry Pincus, that revealed he was a strongman swimmer — that is, he did stunts where he swam long distances (usually a mile or two) and used a rope in his teeth to pull up to five rowboats with men in them. Sometimes he even did this with his arms tied behind his back. This alone would have been sufficient to lure me, but then I found a prison record for him and had to know more.
Pocket of history I want to know more about
If you’re like me, there are slices of history you have a passing knowledge of — maybe you studied them briefly in high school — but you never truly wrapped your head around them. Every once in a while, I’m fortunate enough to be able to address one of these gaps thanks to a beckoning ancestor.
Ambrose Hawkins, a 3rd great-grandfather of Pharrell Williams, is one such person. I was aware of the American Colonization Society and its efforts in the first half of the nineteenth century to send free people of color to Africa (which they referred to as “repatriation” in spite of the fact that most descended from families that had been in America for generations), but Pharrell’s antecedent left an intriguing paper trail and it wasn’t until I investigated his involvement that I gained a better understanding.
AI imagining of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 5th great-grandparents, David and Sophie Towns
David and Sophie Towns, a pair of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 5th great-grandparents, were kind enough to take me on an extended ride to learn not only what it was like to be an interracial couple in the early 1800s, but also about the chaotic early days of Texas and the role that slavery played in the revolution that gained its independence from Mexico.
Challenge
Stubbornness in genealogists can be a useful trait because we often encounter obstacles. We tend to refer to them as “brick walls,” and I’ve never met one I didn’t want to kick down or climb over. It’s a bit twisted perhaps, but I like it when the ancestors make me work for it.
I dealt this when unearthing the roots of both Barack and Michelle Obama. In the case of then-candidate Obama, I ventured back in time to see how far you had to go to find immigrants (aside from his father who returned to Kenya). This is how I made my acquaintance with his 3rd great-grandfather, Fulmoth Kearney, from Ireland.
Ireland loves to claim its own, so once word got out that Barack Obama had Irish forebears, I was contacted by members of the Irish media wanting to know exactly where his family was from. One of the most common stumbling blocks in Irish genealogy is identifying the place of origin, particularly if the immigrants left fairly early, and Fulmoth’s departure was Famine era. In other words, figuring out which town or village got credit was not going to be easy. Ultimately, it was a pair of tombstones in Ohio that pointed me to Moneygall in County Offaly. If they hadn’t existed, it might have taken me several years instead of a couple of months to ascertain his ancestral home. To this day, the resulting Barack Obama Plaza, a highway service station in Moneygall, gets rediscovered and goes gently viral once or twice every year.
In the case of Michelle Obama, it was a mother-son pair who grabbed my attention, Melvina and Dolphus Shields. I first observed them together in the 1870 census, living next door to a white Shields family, and also noted that though they were living in Georgia, Melvina had been born in South Carolina. The obvious questions arose, and having done a lot of African American genealogy, I was well aware there would be no simple answers. It took me several months, but I was eventually able to ferret out the answers I sought.
Unexpected locations, heritage, and/or connections
I love those moments when you’re poking around a family tree and come across a surprising location. This occurred not long ago with Taylor Swift when I noticed that one of her great-grandfathers had been born at sea. As I continued to burrow, South Africa and Malta came into the picture — not what I had anticipated when I began.
This reminded me of my probe into Jon Stewart’s ancestry that turned up a document stating that one of his grandfathers, Nathan Laskin, had been born in Manzhouli, now part of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China. I hadn’t seen that coming.
I was also caught off-guard when I realized that one of Bruno Mars’s grandmothers was Jewish, the daughter of parents from Ukraine and Hungary. Like so many, I was aware of his Puerto Rican and Filipino heritage, but not this aspect.
And then there are the unexpected connections between famous people, but not necessarily that they’re cousins. Perhaps I’m more dismissive than I should be, but when you see such tales in the media, the celebrities cited are typically very distant — 10th or even 20th — cousins — and once you get back that far, we all have millions of cousins, so it rarely impresses me. I prefer stealth links of a different sort.
For instance, when I was asked to look into the family history of civil rights activist and one-time presidential candidate, Al Sharpton, I became fascinated with one of his great-grandfathers, Coleman Sharpton. Imagine my queasiness when I uncovered the fact that Coleman had once been enslaved by relatives of Strom Thurmond, who had run for President with the aim of preserving racial segregation.
Fortunately, most such hidden associations are more pleasant in nature, such as ancestresses of Michelle Obama and Meghan Markle living near each other in Jonesboro, Georgia, and relatives of President Joe Biden and Taylor Swift living in the same pocket of Portsea, England.
Roots claiming them
Finally, I enjoy getting pulled into cases where it seems that a high profile individual was almost destined to become known for a specific reason because, well, their ancestors steered them in that direction. Hannah Waddingham is a classic case. As I pushed my way back on her mother’s side of the family, I waded through four generations of singers and musicians, so it’s no wonder that she’s such a gifted singer and performer. It’s in her blood.
The same is also true of Anthony Bourdain. Yes, he was a vagabond, and once you know that his grandfather, Pierre M. Bourdain, stowed away on a ship to America at the age of 13, and that his ancestors meandered around France, Brazil, Ukraine, Spain, Austria, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Gibraltar, it seems almost inevitable that he would also be a wanderer.
And then, of course, there are the physical resemblances. Please enjoy this sampling.
Top: Bruno Mars next to one of his grandfathers (credit for photo on right: PR Photos); Middle: Jon Stewart and his great-uncle; Bottom: Barack Obama next to his 3rd great-grandfather, Fulmoth Kearney (credit for photo on left: Merlyn White).
So these are the elements that can turn a casual exploration of anyone’s roots into an obsession with one or two of his or her predecessors — at least for me. But what about you? What turns “just another” ancestor into a “shiny object” one for you?
Note regarding AI: While I make liberal use of AI to generate images to accompany my articles (and always identify them as such), it has not been used in any way to write this article — no brainstorming, drafting, editing, or any other aspect.
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