Ellen DeGeneres has some notable cousins!

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The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) recently announced that entertainer Ellen DeGeneres has New England ancestry and has several notable cousins - including Halle Berry and Richard Gere. The press release is here.

The article mentions that Halle Berry is a distant cousin to Mark Wahlberg, Mark is a distant cousin to Madonna, she is a distant cousin to Camilla Parker-Bowles, who is a cousin of Diana Spencer, who was a cousin to Tim Robbins, who is a cousin to Richard Gere.

This article on Inside TV, with a link to a video of Ellen's show (which is pretty funny), claims that Ellen is related to all of these celebrities, but the NEHGS article indicates that she is related to only Halle Berry and Richard Gere. The article's author forgets that "a cousin of my cousin may not be my cousin." Or probably doesn't understand any of this!

You can see family trees for some of these celebrities, and many others, at http://www.genealogy.com/famousfolks/ including:

* Halle Berry - not much here...there may be more elsewhere

* Madonna - a fine French Canadian ancestry

* Diana Spencer - see also here.

* Richard Gere

There are extensive family trees at the William Addams Reitwiesner's Genealogy Services site for:

* Camilla Parker-Bowles

* Halle Berry

* Tim Robbins

* Mark Wahlberg

I don't see a family tree for Ellen DeGeneres online, but perhaps it will appear shortly.

Gary Boyd Roberts and his colleagues at the New England Historic Genealogical Society have published many ancestries of some of these celebrities but I didn't see them on the NEHGS web site. They may be hiding in the New England Ancestors Magazine publications.

So why do I care? Well, I'm just a sensitive guy interested in everybody's ancestry, but I would like to know if I'm related to these folks too. Actually, I just want to impress my cousins, brothers and offspring so maybe they'll become hooked on genealogy research.

UPDATED: Thanks to reader/blogger Martin for the links for Berry, Robbins and Wahlberg. I missed them on the WARGS site. Martin said that all of Roberts' work is on the NEHGS site, but I don't see them doing a search for several of them.