Muhammad Ali - Remembering The Greatest

I was extremely surprised to discover Muhammad Ali on my family tree.,only because his daughter married into our Jewish tribe. It seems that almost every famous person I look up on google+geni is on my family tree . I began looking at Geni people out of pure curiosity and am discovering more and more who have a link to my family tree. Have you or anyone else here have similar experiences ?

I have indeed the same experience, so I raised the question in another discussion the other day with no response, I´m glad You bring it up :) When I noticed how many famous people, Swedish & international, I tried, just for fun to check my connection with The Beatles-members & I was, according to Geni, connected with all 4, so I tried sir George Martin as well & BINGO again...I´m even related to Chief Sitting Bull, so I begin to be a bit sceptic to the reliability...

Oops, "...how many famous people,...., I was related to...", sorry.

Judy C. Navon-Dreyfuss and Per Anders Dencker, the point of Geni's World Family Tree is to show that everyone in the world is connected. That's not disputed by genealogists or geneticists; that's fact.

What *can* be disputed are specific lines. If you have particular lines that you think might be inaccurate, the best thing to do is simply go through and verify each step in the chain.

Muhammad Ali is my 16th cousin once removed because he had WASP ancestry, which is very common for African-Americans. Nothing surprising to me about that all.

Why's it common for blacks to have white Protestant ancestry?

...& I´m not complaining at all being related to all 4 members of The Beatles, sir George Martin, Columbus, Stalin, Lenin, Engels, Sir Winston Churchill & Charles De Gaulle amongst others :)...

Jonathan, I am surprised of you question since it appears you have strong knowledge of languages & history...via the slavery trade [brit & american the largest probably all trades combined that existed] and the force adaptation of anglo-american names, traditions, religions etc to the enslaved. & even if, there was no 'natural/forced' mixing of african, and european individuals sexually, protestant sects would have been a part of the fabric for their sunday activities on almost all parts of the crown's territory & on the land of the stars and bars...

It took me literally 100 hours to find connection to the big tree for Phife Dawg, Maurice White, Ben Carson, Moses Malone, and other notable black people, in some cases I needed to add 1000 or so profiles before finally encountering one Jew or Christian connected extremely remotely to the black person, often by 50+ relations. Census records rarely show any mixing between whites and blacks. They sometimes have mulattos but rarely.

African Americans are poorly documented and "race" was in the eye of the beholder.

I saw something interesting recently I meant to post. DNA testing tells us that Americans of African descent often have European ancestry. When they correlate with migration patterns, they find the Europeans came in early, before ... 1865.

quite a few of my 'euro-american' cousins would prefer to have their 'browner cousins' quietly swept under rug and not be identified...i am glad that there are copies of documents in my family to show the relationships that were illegal in the day, in the southern u.s. & some to many northern areas, were loving and natural regardless of the code of law...

Well, this conversation certainly hasn't gone how I expected. :)

http://blackdemographics.com/geography/african-american-dna/

I would simply say that if you worked regularly and extensively with African-American genealogy, you would probably have a different experience. Even at African-American genealogy conferences I've attended, we've always come back around to who qualifies for DAR and where. Just think of the pyramid theory and the history of race relations, especially the abuse of women, and it all makes perfect sense.

He is also my cousin too and I just found out!

He is my 11th cousin.

12th Cousin 4x for the record...

Just for curiosity sake I am looking at who of you all I might be related to.

Private

Erica Howton

welcome to my big family

Maybe famous people like Muhammad Ali had genealogists over the years preserving his data including whites who copulated with his black female ancestors but for most black people it's always a dead end. Even in Ben Carson's case that Georgia family goes back well before slavery ended but there're no White Christians in that pool of thousands of people. I had to zig-zag many times to finally find someone who married a white Christian

Judy C. Navon-Dreyfuss speaking of zig zags, that's how we connect ! Great to see the links.

Private there is documentation for the slavery years, but it is the work of historians to dig it up. This is also compounded by the loss of courthouse records in Civil War, which is an issue for southern white genealogy also. And for us children of more recent immigrants, we connect through the zig zags.

Oh - and geni says: Muhammad Ali is your 15th cousin twice removed!

Anthony Wheeler (on this discussion) is a DNA cousin but we havent figured out the common ancestor yet.

Muhammad Ali is your 13th cousin once removed.

Back in the 60's, Muhammad used to come into a restaurant every morning in Chicago where I worked. I always waited on him, but never knew he was my 9th cousin. I never found out that we were related until after his death. I think we both would have been surprised and amused.