The Discoveries Continue!

I have been neglectful of my blog for quite some time, and I apologize to those of you who enjoy these little updates. With the recent holidays and a hectic work schedule at my paying job, combined with working on marketing my books and completing my 3rd audiobook, I have been a busy man.

I have been continuing my family research almost daily, and every day I seem to be making even more exciting and shocking ancestral discoveries. I had decided back in December that I was going to try and put together a book for my family that documents our paternal family history. Just as I started putting the book together, I uncovered a series of rather interesting ancestors, which has continued to lead to more and more ancestors. In the past month alone I have added almost 1,000 new relatives to my family tree.

With each new discovery comes hours of research and verification work before I add them to my tree. I like to be very careful about the information that I find and want to ensure that I minimize any errors, although I'm sure that a few mistakes still manage to make their way through. However, as I have had authenticated in the past by a professional genealogist, my research is solid, a fact of which I am quite proud.

For regular readers of my blog, you will already be aware that I have some noble bloodlines in my paternal family. For anyone such as myself that is fortunate enough to have nobles in their family, these ancestors tend to be very well documented, especially if those nobles had ties to royalty, as mine did.

Back in December I came across some names which seemed vaguely familiar to me so I decided to do some research on them. This research took me on a journey back through the Middle Ages and back over 1,000 years on several branches of my paternal lineage. Some of the ancestors I discovered I had never heard of before, while others are well known to me, and to anyone who has studied history. As a result of these discoveries, I have been spending hours each day tracing, verifying and adding many new and exciting relatives to my family tree.

Some of the recent additions to my family tree that will be familiar to many people are:

Queen Elizabeth II and her maternal family

President Thomas Jefferson

President Zachary Taylor

Confederate General Robert E. Lee

President John Quincy Adams

Charles Darwin

First Lady Abigail Adams

Actor Brad Pitt

Actor Valerie Bertinelli

Actor Elizabeth Montgomery

Heiress and Manson family murder victim, Abigail Folger

Princess Diana

Duchess Sarah Ferguson

Actor Katherine Hepburn

Bill Gates

John D. Rockefeller

Lizzie Borden

General Douglas McArthur

Author Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)

Designer Gloria Vanderbilt

Anchor Anderson Cooper

Actor Marilyn Monroe

These famous people are just the tip of what seems to be a very big iceberg. I still have research to do on both President George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, who are also distant cousins of mine. There are, if you can believe it, even more US Presidents in my family tree as well as 5 of King Henry VIII's wives, as well as Henry himself. The list is both incredible and somewhat daunting.

I will attempt to add biographies of each of my famous relatives in the not-too-distant future, but in the meantime, it's back to my research! I guess the family history book will have to wait until I reach an end to all these interesting and fascinating family members...