I am going back now to pick up the week 39 theme of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. As I mentioned before, I am not doing these in order anymore. It is also unlikely that I will finish this year. That’s okay, I did the challenge last year and I have a lot of other demands just now.  I will still finish all 52 at some point.  The optional theme for week 39 was “Unusual.”  I had written something else for this theme, but I was never happy with it, so here is my substitution.

I recently canceled a subscription to Newspaper Archives for a number of reasons, but it was mostly because of the price. It just wasn’t a good value for me. Instead I decided to subscribe to a premium membership of Geneanet. This site is primarily French, but a number of Germans have contributed trees, and I often find clues to my German family here.

GeneaNet, it seems, owns the website GeneaStar.org. I have heard a lot of buzz about GeneaStar; it matches your family tree with the family trees of celebrities. You can access this site for free, but I don’t think that you can do an automated match without being a member of GeneaNet. (If you know otherwise, please leave a comment below.) I have to say GeneaStar really wasn’t on my radar in any serious way. It sounded a little frivolous.  In fact, I may be one of the last people to have not tried Geneastar; but today I decided to give it a whirl. I had previously run the index for my family tree which is pretty extensive, so it didn’t take very long to come back with results.

I’m not sure I was expecting to find any connections, but I was surprised. There was just one hit for my mother-in-law’s family and a couple for mine. William Walton and his wife, Alice Martin, were the first to pop up with one result found. I knew that William Walton was the progenitor of the Byberry Waltons of Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  I have written about this family before. William Walton was born on August 19, 1629, in Oxhill, Warwickshire, England, to Thomas Walton and Anne Hurd. William married Alice Martin on 30 September 1657 and together they had four sons: Nathaniel, born about 1656; Thomas, born about 1658; Daniel, born about 1660; and, William, born about 1662. William Walton, Sr., died in Oxhill on February 10, 1681. The following year, the four brothers, all Quakers, set out for the New World.

With anticipation I clicked the GeneaStar link under William Walton to see who my husband’s famous relative is. Oh, no, I groaned. This can’t be. Gary’s famous relative is Sarah Palin!

Sarah Palin – photograph courtesy of Gage Skidmore

(If you don’t know who Sarah Palin is, she is the former Governor of Alaska and Vice-presidential running mate of Senator John McCain in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. She is also a TV commentator and author, who endorses Tea Party politics. I consider her to be one of the most unusual characters to come out of politics in a long and that’s saying something! If you need to be reminded, just Google “Palinisms.” Here’s a roundup of some good ones.

My mother always reminded me that you can choose your friends, but not your relatives. Sarah Palin and I do not see eye to eye about much of anything. She is among the last people that I would want to welcome to my family, but here I was, spending the afternoon extending the descendants of William Walton down through the generations to ultimately include Sarah Louise Heath, born 11 February 1964. She married Todd Palin in 1988. From everything that I can tell, the tree provided on GeneaStar appears to be reasonably accurate. I added documentation as I worked my way through Sarah’s ancestors. Ancestry.com now tells me that Sarah Palin is the 9th cousin once removed of my husband…sigh.

Here is how the two trees look together:

12 Generations from Sarah Heath Palin to William Walton

11 Generations from my Husband to William Walton

So, I guess the good news is that I didn’t find any mass murderers and I was a lot more pleased with my famous relatives. I’ll write about them another time. On another positive note, I’m not expecting an invitation to the Palin house for Christmas dinner, nor will she be receiving one from me!