I’ve done a fair amount of genealogy work since I retired in 2018, making over 4,500 contributions to a combination of families’ and friends' ancestral trees. Each time I embark on a new mission to discover and add people and relationships to FamilySearch.org, like the more famous Ancestry.com, but it is free (I love free), I’m certain to uncover something a bit strange or unusual. But as I detail a recent journey below, this particular discovery was as much fortune as it was the result of a lot of digging.
The tale begins one evening when my wife Elaine, our friend Kim, and Kim’s husband Dan’s mother, Mary, were having dinner and drinks at one of our favorite restaurants. When the topic of genealogy came up, Mary said she didn’t know her maternal grandparents. I said I would do some digging and see what I could find. I couldn’t find anything in FamilySearch, so I logged on to my account at the Washington-Centerville Public Library and accessed MyHeritage.com, yet another genealogy website. I found her maternal grandparents, who were in FamilySearch but not linked to Mary's grandparents, and added that relationship, which included two sets of great-grandparents. Still more to do, but I was making some nice progress.
Then I decided to look at the siblings and their children of this new connection and noticed one of them was Martin Schneble. My great-grandparents were Rudolph and Theresa Schneble, so I wondered if Martin was a relative of mine. I found Martin Schneble in my family tree and compared his FamilySearch ID to the one I found in Mary’s family tree. They matched. Using the View My Relationship feature in FamilySearch, I found that Martin is my second cousin twice removed. To find Dan’s relationship to Martin, I used a website called RelativeFinder.org. I input Dan’s and Martin’s FamilySearch IDs, and it found that Martin’s wife is Dan’s first cousin once removed. So we’re not blood relatives, but what are called cousins-in-law or cousins-by-marriage. Still, it’s interesting that our family trees intersect in some way. But the story doesn’t end here. It gets downright bizarre.
Since Dan and I aren’t blood-related, I figured that the View My Relationship feature in FamilySearch would not find a connection between us, but I decided to try it, just to see what would happen. I was shocked when it found a connection. Dan is “The husband of my wife's 15th cousin once removed.” What! Our wives are blood relatives! Distant cousins, but true cousins!
FamilySearch produces a diagram when a relationship is found, mapping all the mothers and fathers that lead back to the common point, in this case, Sir James Butler of Polestown and Sabina Kavanagh. They are Elaine’s 15th-great-grandparents and Kim’s 14th-great-grandparents who lived back in the 1400s in Kilkenny County, Ireland. That filters down to both Elaine's and Kim’s mothers' sides of their respective families.
James, a prominent Anglo-Irish warlord, managed the Irish territories for his absentee cousins, the 6th and 7th Earls of Ormond. In 1468, King Edward IV granted him the manor of Callan for life, and he was later knighted and built Neigham Castle near Gowran. Sabina was a Gaelic noblewoman and Princess of Leinster. Elaine descends from their son Piers, the 8th Earl of Ormond, and his wife, Margaret Fitzgerald, and Kim descends from their daughter Ellice and her husband, Sir George Fleming of Stephenstown. Both Elaine and Kim descend from Irish royalty.
Since Dan and I are married to Kim and Elaine, we are, again, cousins-in-law, this time via a much more direct path than the first relationship above.
