Elvis and Me

I have an account at FamilySearch, one of the most popular and useful genealogy sites on the Internet. (And it’s free!) Yesterday, as part of a campaign to advertise its annual conference, the nonprofit sent an email informing me that my father and Elvis Presley were sixth cousins. I mean, that’s good marketing, right?

I did some research for a friend and discovered that she and Johnny Depp were something like fourth cousins. But these days, I’d much rather be related to Elvis. I texted the news to my sisters, we joked about our dad’s terrible dancing, and that was that.

Then I looked more closely.

According to FamilySearch, my father’s maternal great-great-great-grandmother was a woman called Cecilia Kelly. She was born in Ireland in 1769 and died in Ontario, Canada, in 1848. This doesn’t raise any red flags. My grandmother’s family were Irish and named McGinn. The first to come to Iowa was Peter McGinn, for whom the tiny Clinton County town of Petersville is named. And he came via Canada. (Those are the McGinns on the homepage of this website.) So a relative on the McGinn side who was born in Ireland and died in Canada makes sense.

But look what happens when you click on Cecilia Kelley:

Something stands out here:

“Sources (0).”

In other words, there is not a single document attached here that would corroborate Cecilia Kelly’s birth year or place, her death year or place, or her relationship to anyone. This is not to say this information is not correct, just that how am I supposed to know? Should I take it on faith?

Only if it’s really important I be related to Elvis Presley.

Now go up one generation:

One might expect that Cecilia’s mother would also have been born in Ireland. But according to this family tree, Lucy Wesson was born in Brunswick County, Virginia. And according to the tree, so was her husband, David D. Kelly Jr. How then, do they give birth to a daughter in Ireland?

Notice that Lucy Wesson has a single source. Turns out this is what’s called a Legacy NFS source, which just means that her information has been transferred from a previous version of a FamilySearch tree.

Which is to say, it’s not a source at all.

It strikes me as almost certainly true that David Kelly and Lucy Wesson did not move from colonial Virginia to Ireland in order to have their child, and then return to Virginia to die. And this, in turn, means that my dad and I are almost certainly not cousins to Elvis Presley, who does appear to descend from the Wesson line.

None of this is meant to knock FamilySearch. An amazing site and a great marketing ploy. But don’t accept your family history on faith. Always do your research!