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Shiny Object Ancestors
The Ones We Can’t Resist
When I recently delved into Taylor Swift’s roots, I made mention of a phenomenon I refer to as “shiny object ancestor.” And while it was just a passing remark, it resonated with a number of fellow genealogists who reached out to say that they knew exactly what I meant.
Whenever you research any family tree — your own or a complete stranger’s — there’s inevitably an ancestor (though it can also be a pair) who calls more loudly than the others. Anyone who’s experienced this will tell you that it’s almost as if they’re insisting on your attention.
This has happened to me countless times over my decades as a genealogist, so I decided to see if I could explain what it is that makes certain progenitors so irresistible. After a little mulling, I came up with a handful of factors that seem to be at play, and I’m curious whether others will agree.
Accidental discovery
Learning something that makes you do a double take, as often as not, results from tripping across a random tidbit in a newspaper, and this is the equivalent of an engraved invitation to dig deeper. In the case of Katy Perry, for instance, I spotted an article about a gold heist in 1859 San Francisco that featured members of her family. That caused me to follow the trail of her Irish immigrant great-great-grandmother, Anna “Hannah” Maria Mulhare, and reach the conclusion that she’s probably the one who wound up with the haul.
Similarly, with Barry Manilow, I stumbled across a piece about one of his grandfathers, Harry Pincus, that revealed he was a strongman swimmer — that is, he did stunts where he swam long distances (usually a mile or two) and used a rope in his teeth to pull up to five rowboats with men in them. Sometimes he even did this with his arms tied behind his back. This alone would have been sufficient to lure me, but then I found a prison record for him and had to know more.
Pocket of history I want to know more about
If you’re like me, there are slices of history you have a passing knowledge of — maybe you studied them briefly in…
