You'll need a free FamilySearch account and then upload your own family tree to the FamilySearch site. Then when you log into the Relative Finder page it will take your tree's information and compare it with information from others to determine how you may be related to famous people. These are divided up into Groups as seen in this list:
I spent some time exploring some of Categories. In Authors and Poets I saw some I already knew are distant cousins, such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Laura Ingalls Wilder. But I was surprised when I looked at the "Famous Americans" to see the name Massasoit Osamequin at the top of the list. Massasoit was the Native American who helped the Plymouth colonists when they first arrived. According to the website, Massasoit was my 12th great uncle. I clicked on his name to see exactly how we were supposedly related:
The chart shows Massasoit as being the uncle of a Native American woman named Oguina Quadequina, the wife of my 10x great grandfather Gabriel Whelden/Weldon.
This differs from my information, which is that Gabriel's wife was name Margaret whose maiden name was unknown. I checked out the tree of the person who has Gabriel's wife as Oguina and I didn't find any source or citation, so for the moment I am sticking with what I have in my own database.
While this is interesting and fun to look at, I will need to check all of these out one by one and look for documents and records that will substantiate the relationships. I'll put off starting that until 2019.
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