According to TMZ, a MyHeritage study released Wednesday found that Sydney Sweeney and Marilyn Monroe are ninth cousins once removed, both descended from Ezra Perry, an early settler of Sandwich, Massachusetts who died in 1689. The Hollywood Reporter has the same find.
Name the mechanism, because there is one and it is the whole story. A subscription genealogy company runs a "study" pairing a marketable blonde with a dead icon, and every outlet in the country reports it as a discovery. The study is the product. The news cycle is the delivery system. Ezra Perry is not a coincidence, he is a press release with a birth year.
Now the math, because it is funnier than the news. Ninth cousins once removed means the shared ancestor sits eight generations back, at which point the two women share roughly the same DNA as two strangers on a flight. The family tree hits a point where it stops being specific and starts being everyone, which means Ezra Perry is probably your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather too. The study did not find a family. It found the ceiling, the point where the cousin card stops being exclusive.
The best part is that this is a paid subscription. You pay about $99 a year to learn that your famous relative was born 300 years before you and died 85 years ago. TMZ closes with the actual conclusion, "Hollywood is a small town," and that is the entire business model. The town is small. The subscription is for life.
YOUR TURN: the cousin is news, or is the news that you can now say it on a talk show?
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