Sometimes family surnames cross over between maternal & paternal lineages. In my case, my maternal grandmother's family name was "Crosby", but my maternal Crosby family has proven quite elusive beyond my 2x great-grandfather. My grandma always told me that the Crosby's were Irish, and most likely their lineage is/was Irish, but my 2x great-grandfather was actually born in the USA in Upstate New York. Beyond that though, I know nothing about his lineage despite searching now for 2 decades.

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On my paternal lineage I discovered another more famous Crosby family to whom I am related, and that is to Bing Crosby who was a singer and actor and is one of Hollywood's great icons. 

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Bing was a distant relative - he was my 16th cousin, 3x removed and our shared ancestor was my 18th great-grandparents, Baron Thomas Stanley and Baroness Joan Goushill. I have never met any of these more famous Crosby's, but I grew up knowing who Bing Crosby was, and my grandmother was definitely a fan of both his music and his movies. Somewhere in my trove of collectibles I have an old record cleaner (hand held, of course) with Bing's signature and photo on it - this was one of the items that I inherited from my grandmother when she passed in 2002.

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Normally I write biographies on these pages, but Bing's storied career, which spanned 50+ years, could not possibly be compressed into one simple page. There are numerous biographies written about this talented entertainer and vary from glowing to highly critical depending upon the author. 

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In researching Bing Crosby and his immediate family, it does appear that there are a couple of recurring patterns in the family: problems with alcohol & depression, and multiple marriages. This is not such an uncommon theme in any family, and certainly not in this author's family. The only difference is that these particular people lived a great deal of their lives in the public eye, so scrutiny, criticism and the spotlight was always following them around; privacy certainly didn't seem to apply to this particular branch of my family.

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Aside from Bing and his family, there was another Crosby cousin that I was surprised to discover, and that was Denise Crosby, who I have known for years as a talented actor, starting with her role as Lt. Tasha Yar on Star Trek The Next Generation. I had always suspected that she was related to Bing Crosby, but I never really took the time to research and confirm this idea, but it turns out that I was correct. 

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Denise is the daughter of Bing's son, Dennis Crosby. Dennis was not married to Denise's mother, Marilyn Scott, but a sensational and very public paternity trial proved that Dennis was Denise's father. Even after this fact was proven, the research I have done indicates that Denise, who was Bing Crosby's granddaughter, never met her famous grandfather. I don't like to pass judgement, but I cannot reconcile Bing's public persona as a "nice guy/father figure" with him never meeting and being involved in one of his grandchildren's lives.

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As mentioned, I knew of Denise Crosby in passing, and the role that she briefly held on TNG. I had always wondered why her character was killed off on TNG, and then reprised in a couple of latter episodes; I thought that Tasha Yar was an interesting character who added a strong female member to the cast. However, as I researched Denise's decision to leave the cast her decision began to make a lot more sense; she wanted the character that she portrayed to have more depth, but the character was being pushed into the background as the series progressed (if you are a TNG fan, you can see this for yourself as you rewatch the TNG episodes).

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Denise has performed in many other roles on both TV and film, and she has produced and co-produced a couple of Star Trek documentaries. In fact, if you look at Denise's resume, you will see that she has been very active over the years and has played a wide range of characters during her long Hollywood career.

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There are a lot more Crosby family members, and each one has their own story to tell. These stories could easily fill an entire Crosby Family website, something that I will leave for someone else to do. If you want to learn more about this famous family, you can do your own internet search quite easily - just be prepared to spend hours and hours reading about each of these interesting Crosby family members!