I found out last night that Zach de la Rocha, most famous for being the vocalist for rock band Rage Against the Machine, is my fifth cousin once-removed. That was fun to tell my bandmates.
Our common ancestor was Samuel M. Fleming, 1757-1813.
That is interesting. How does one find out such things?
I would guess Ancestory.com and such.
I use FamilySearch. It's free. I was scrolling through a list of living cousins when I saw Zach's name. So I checked details on Wikipedia to make sure it was really him, and it was.
Now, by the time you get to fifth cousins, you're deep in "six degrees of separation" territory. I mean, there is a pretty strong statistical possibility that one or more of y'all is a fifth, sixth, or 7th cousin of mine, by marriage if not by blood. Probably not Tony, though, as there seems to be very little Italian representation in my ancestry. Most of my people are northern European, though based on names there were some Spaniards that joined up with the Norman invasion.
Four of my family lines trace to colonial America, two in Massachusetts and two in Virginia. One of the Virginia ones originated in Switzerland. My namesake line immigrated from Germany to Wisconsin by way of Canada in 1848, and another line came from Scotland to Canada in the 1870s. These German and Scottish lines moved to North Dakota in the 1880s after the Natives were pushed into South Dakota, and hooked up there.
From there, the Dakota folks went to California during the depression, and by then the Virginia lines had found their way to Iowa and New Mexico as did one of the Massachusetts lines. They eventually all met up in Los Gatos, California, and...here I am. Though there still a lot of my kin in Bottineau County, ND and in Appanoose County in Iowa.
My wife's people all came out of Buffalo, NY and Newark, NJ. Polish and German, mostly.
