Ancestry.com

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Taylor Swift Is Related to an Actual Tortured Poet

Guess who's related to Emily Dickinson?

(Newser) - Taylor Swift has a rather interesting sixth cousin, three times removed. Ancestry.com gives Today the scoop that dangling out on the songstress's family tree is another bit of American royalty: Emily Dickinson. "Swift and Dickinson both descend from a 17th-century English immigrant (Swift's ninth great-grandfather and...

DNA Tests Often Give Up Family Secrets. Not Like This One

Jaclyn Peiser reveals what the children born to Anne Bryntwick discovered

(Newser) - Mike Mitchell, who died in 1991, raised eight children with his wife. One of them, David, was born in Montreal on March 15, 1954. More than 60 years later, David learned a girl born in the same city on the very same day was also Mike Mitchell's child. In...

Guess Who Tom Hanks Is Related To?
Guess Who Tom
Hanks Is Related To?

Guess Who Tom Hanks Is Related To?

Turns out Hanks, who plays Fred Rogers in new movie, is Rogers' 6th cousin, per Ancestry.com

(Newser) - It felt like a "no-brainer" that Tom Hanks was cast as Mister Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood , opening nationwide Friday. Some even say the 63-year-old actor "was born" to play the gentle children's show host. That turns out to be more true than any...

Woman's Xmas Gift to Parents Brings Devastating Surprise

Rebecca Cartellone, conceived via IVF, finds out dad isn't biological father due to apparent clinic mix-up

(Newser) - A 24-year-old Ohio woman who thought an Ancestry.com kit would make a great Christmas gift for her parents is now wracked with guilt, and her family thrown into turmoil, after the DNA test revealed her dad isn't her biological father. Per the New York Daily News , the family...

Her Baby Died After Birth 69 Years Ago—or So She Was Told

An emotional reunion for Genevieve Purinton and the daughter she never knew she had

(Newser) - For nearly 70 years, Genevieve Purinton believed the baby girl she delivered in an Indiana hospital died soon after birth. This week in Florida, however, she met that baby girl, now a 69-year-old mother and grandmother, very much alive and working as a massage therapist in Vermont. "I'm...

Woman 'Horrified' by Ancestry.com Connection

Fertility doctor used own sperm to impregnate patient: suit

(Newser) - Kelli Rowlette thought she knew who her biological father was. So when Ancestry.com showed her DNA matched a sample from a retired fertility doctor, she assumed the service was unreliable, per the Washington Post . That was until she learned the same doctor had artificially inseminated her mother with his...

Longtime Friends in Hawaii Are Closer Than They Thought

After a 60-year friendship, Alan Robinson and Walter Macfarlane learn they're brothers

(Newser) - They've been buddies for six decades now, ever since meeting in sixth grade, but it turns out that two Hawaii men are even closer than they thought. Alan Robinson and Walter Macfarlane are, in fact, brothers, reports KHON2 . The discovery came when Macfarlane used Ancestry.com to look up...

Cops: Man Busted in Decades-Long Secret Life That Fooled His Wife

Richard Hoagland arrested thanks to search on Ancestry.com

(Newser) - When Richard Hoagland fled Indiana in 1993, leaving behind four children from two families, he was considered missing and in 2003 declared dead. In reality, police say he was alive and well, living in Florida as Terry Jude Symansky, an unmarried Florida fisherman with no kids who drowned in 1991—...

Ancestry.com Wants to Reveal Your Disease Risks

So far, the FDA isn't having it

(Newser) - The company that tells you whether you can perhaps blame last weekend's sunburn on your Irish roots now wants to tell you your risk of cervical cancer. Ancestry.com, which claims to have amassed genetic information on more than 1 million customers through its $99 DNA kits, is in...

Obama Roots Traced to 1st African-American Slave

Ancestry.com genealogists spent 500 hours making the connection

(Newser) - Ancestry.com has traced President Obama's roots back to Germany and linked him to Rush Limbaugh . Now the site has named a new potential Obama relative: the first documented African-American slave. CNN reports on the result of some 500 hours of work by four genealogists, who were able to...

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