As I am prone to do while we are Networking Family History with Hollywood™, I often watch Turner Classic Movies and programs in search of interesting characters to lineage link into the vast network of family ties that is the Family Forest®.
Earlier this year TCM arranged with Disney to present some classic Disney content on TCM. The one that triggered fun memories that I hadn’t accessed in decades was Davy Crockett.
As a young boy in the 1950s, one of the biggest fads I remember was coonskin caps. No matter where you lived in America, if you didn’t have one, you certainly knew a number of boys who did.
The TCM introduction taught me something I didn’t know. Davy Crockett was the first (and only?) produced-for-television series that was repurposed into a hit theatrical movie.
Against staff recommendations that it be shot in less expensive black and white, since that was how the television audience would see it, visionary Walt Disney insisted that they shot it in color. After the huge popularity of the show, it was re-edited into a movie called “Davy Crockett King of the Wild Frontier”, and what people had already seen for free at home, they then paid to see at theaters.
So I made a note to look for the ancestors of the lead actor, Fess Parker, to see if I could network him into the Family Forest® (since before the end of the last century, the prime directive has been that no one gets into the Family Forest® unless they are related by birth, marriage, or adoption to someone who is already in).
Even though I do this all the time, there is no way I can guess in advance who someone’s closest celebrity cousins will be. In Fess Parker’s case, I was more surprised than usual.
So far in the Family Forest®, Fess Parker’s two closest celebrity cousins are a former Disney Mouseketeer and a President of the United States, Britney Spears (sixth cousin twice removed, 6C2R) and President Obama (7C2R).
So how surprised might you and your family be to discover your closest celebrity cousins?
Now, after twenty years of strategic research and preparation, the Family Forest® can probably show you your closest celebrity cousins through our new connection service.
By the way, in the current issue (November/December 2015) of Cowboys & Indians – The Premier Magazine of the West, Fess Parker is said to be the catalyst for Kurt Russell’s GoGi Wines.
I wonder if Kurt Russell owned a coonskin cap when he was a boy?
