What do the 85th Academy Awards, PBS’ Downton Abbey, Knights Templar, and Super Bowl XLVII have in common?

MEDIA: TV/Oscar trivia from Hollywords Publicity Group

VANCOUVER January 31, 2013 – Sounds impossible?

That’s exactly what Bruce Harrison, the mastermind behind Family Forest®,  would have thought before he spent tens of thousands of hours questing through the nooks and crannies of recorded history, filtering and distilling the knowledge that was assembled by experts, and digitally-indexing the results into an amazingly interconnected network of ancestral pathways that can now be explored visually.

The attached chart is a small example of the answers the Family Forest® can generate. Here’s what you will find: The first column is 21 people. The second column shows their connection to the Oscars, and the third column shows their role.  The next four columns show the computer-generated relationships of the 21 people in the first column to other people.

The fifth column is Seth MacFarlane, Host of the 85th Academy Awards.  The next column is to the 8th Earl of Carnarvon, the present Lord of Highclere Castle, which is the setting for PBS’ enormously popular series Downton Abbey.

Highclere Castle is also the setting for “Lady Almina And The Real Downton Abbey”, a present-day New York Times best-seller written by the 8th and current Countess of Carnarvon. The 8th Earl of Carnarvon has extensive early Colonial American ancestry, which makes him a single-digit cousin to many millions of Downton Abbey fans. Almost half of the people in the column are his single-digit cousins.

The following column is to the founder of Briquebec Castle.“This one is the most fascinating to me,” says Harrison, “because, according to the recorded history mapped out in the Family Forest®, it is one of my own ancestral homes.”  And not only does Briquebec Castle have Knights Templar history (remember the “Da Vinci Code”?), but it is possible to book a stay at the castle tonight, and it is the focal point of what may be the world’s largest eBook. In addition to Briquebec being an ancestral home to at least 20 of the 21 people in column one, it is also an ancestral home of the 8th Earl of Carnarvon, owner of Highclere Castle, and the Harbaugh brothers.

And speaking of the Harbaugh brothers, the last column is to the two of them who will be making history by dueling in Super Bowl XLVII this coming Sunday, Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh and San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh.

All of that almost makes history cool, now doesn’t it?

Media Contact: Holly Carinci, CEO HollyWords Publicity Group c: 604-723-7963 e: holly@hollywordspublicity.com w: http://www.hollywordspublicity.com f: http://www.facebook.com/HollywordsPublicityGroup

Presidents’ Day

Reblogged from Your Future, Your Past:

 Do you know this about President George Washington and other presidential trivia?

Do you know how this day in history Washington’s Birthday became known as Presidents’ Day?

 Do you know why President Bush, Senator Kerry and FamilyForest.com were featured in USA Today?

 Do you know why CBS News did a story on President Bush that mentioned his connection to Hugh Hefner? 

Read more… 84 more words

Just some Presidents Day Trivia from previous blogs. and a link to why President Obama, President Bush and Walt Disney are mentioned in the NPR radio story. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15401094

President Lincoln and President Obama share ancestors

Reblogged from Your Future, Your Past:

Leading up to the Presidential Inauguration on Tuesday, there has been plenty of talk about similarities and connections between President Lincoln and President Obama, but there’s a closer more personal connection they share that’s been overlooked, DNA.

 

According to the ancestral history that had already been mapped out in the

Family Forest® New World Edition , there’s a movie you can order today…

Read more… 89 more words

Largest Ancestral History eBook Coming Soon

Largest Ancestral History eBook Coming Soon

Wouldn’t it be cool to be able show your kids and grandkids that you are able to trace your own generation-by-generation ancestral pathways from
one of your ancestors directly into one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays?

This may be the ancestral history eBook with which you can do just that. At least hundreds of millions of living people are descended from the
subject of this book. If you have any European ancestry within the last five centuries, you are probably one of them.

The magnitude of The Family Forest® Descendants of King Duncan I of Scotland is staggering. It is 25,209 pages in length, and includes
216,538 different people, some of whom are themselves the ancestors of many millions of people.

The complete contents of at least 17 other Family Forest® eBook titles (totalling over $340, see list below) are all contained in this one
eBook title. Some of the contents from hundreds of other Family Forest® eBook titles are also contained in this same eBook title.

This short video will give you a good idea of what you can expect to find in this eBook.

We are asking for pricing advice. $129 is what we are leaning toward now, and it seems like a bargain price, considering that it contains much more than $340 of ancestral history content, and it can be the gateway portal into an inspirational lifetime learning experience.

However, $129 is still $40 more than buying the entire Family Forest® National Treasure Edition. Anyone with a reasonably powerful computer can use the National Treasure to generate this eBook (plus many more), if they are willing to commit about a day and a half of computer time.

Do you have any pricing advice you are willing to share with us?

Whatever the price it is released at, the Antelope Valley Genealogy Society will be giving this Duncan I eBook download away as a door prize at their conference in October. 

P.S. This title may be an exception to Jeff Bezos’ claim to be able to deliver any eBook title within 60 seconds.

Corporal Roger Wellington

Earl Sir Thomas Boleyn

Gov. Simon Bradstreet

Gov. Thomas Dudley

John Whitney

King Edward III of England

King Robert I of Scotland

Lady Joan Beaufort

Lord Sir Oliver De St John

Rev. John Maverick

Rev. John Woodbridge

Richard Sears

Richard Warren

Roger Harlakenden

Samuel Appleton

Sir Richard Saltonstall

Thomas Ludlow

$100 Million Legacy Released a Century Later

There was an interesting story this week about one of the most unusual wills in American history. It appears that about a century ago, one of the richest men in America must have been very upset with his immediate family.

Hon. Wellington R. Burt, a large timber baron in Michigan, died in 1919 and left his fortune to his family. Nothing unusual about that. But one condition stipulated in the will brought this large legacy into the news in 2011.

Wellington Burt’s fortune was not to be distributed to his family heirs until 21 years after all of his grandchildren who were living in 1919 had died. That condition has just been met, and the $100 to $110 million legacy is about to be released.

You may be surprised to see who has family ties to this history book event. Within the 25,000 plus relatives in the Family Forest kinship report (see question number ten) of Hon. Wellington R. Burt are a number of instantly recognizable names.

Some of the other wealthy Americans are Wall Street icon Warren Buffett (7C3R), AOL founder Steve Case (6C3R), Mrs. King Ranch Henrietta Maria Morse Chamberlain (7C), firearms manufacturer Colonel Samuel Colt (7C), department store heir Marshall Field V (6C3R), Wall Street legend JP Morgan (7C1R), and eBay executive Meg Whitman (7C3R).

Some of the entertainers are Humphrey Bogart (8C1R), Spring Byington (6C2R), Agatha Christie (6C2R), Cindy Crawford (8C4R), Bruce and Laura Dern (8C2R & 8C3R), Jane and Peter Fonda (6C3R), Matthew Fox (6C5R), Dorothy and Lillian Gish (6C4R), Ernest Hemingway (8C2R), Dennis Hopper (6C5R), Tom Mix (6C2R), Anthony Perkins (6C3R), Robert Redford (6C5R), Christopher Reeve (5C4R), Tim Robbins (6C5R), Pat Robertson (7C4R), Tennessee Williams (6C2R), and Jonathan Winters (6C4R).

And some of the politicians are both Presidents Bush (7C2R & 7C3R), Rep. Ed Case (6C3R), Sir Winston Churchill (6C2R), President Grover Cleveland (6C1R), Vice President Charles Curtis (6C1R), Vice President Charles Gates Dawes (7C2R), President Gerald Ford (6C3R), President Richard Nixon (8C3R), Governor Sarah Palin (6C5R), President Franklin Pierce (5C1R), Vice President Nelson Rockefeller (6C3R), Governor Mitt Romney (5C4R), and President William Howard Taft (8C1R).

I am a 7C4R of Hon. Wellington R. Burt, and the Family Forest® is a People-Centered Approach To History®.

Tim McGraw on WDYTYA

This is another worthwhile and well-done episode available online here from the team that creates the Who Do you Think You Are? program on NBC.

My favorite part is seeing how proudly people react to discovering and sharing with relatives that they have actual family ties to historical places, historical events, and real historical figures, and in this case, to two of Tim’s heroes.

It was interesting watching the story unfold leading up to being able to tell Tim that his hero George Washington knew Tim’s ancestors, and another one of Tim’s ancestors came to America with one of Elvis’ ancestors.

I wonder how Tim and his family will react when they discover that, according to recorded history, they actually share ancestors with George Washington, Elvis Presley, General Patton, Reese Witherspoon, and many other well-known people?

The Family Forest® is now capable of generating a huge number of relationship charts connecting Tim and his children through common ancestors to most of the key people, places, and events in human history, as well as to many of Tim’s entertainment collegues, and probably even more importantly, to Tim’s fans and potential fans.

Before there was a U.S.S. Spangler

We recently learned of the U.S.S. Spangler reunion which will be starting on Monday October 25, 2010 in San Antonio, TX.

Prompted by a great visit from Kristine’s cousin Jeannie, both nieces of the Purple Heart recipient the ship was named for, we began reading through a large stack of Uncle Donald’s letters and clippings that were still in the possession of his only living sibling and my outstanding father-in-law, nonagenarian Robert Kent Spangler.

Amid the sorrow of losing so much promise so early, what fun it was! New discoveries led to other new discoveries.

For instance, we found a letter written on the Fourth of July 1943 to Mr. and Mrs. Martin and Myrtle Elizabeth (Blue) Spangler (Donald’s mother, Mrs. Spangler christened the U.S.S. Spangler).

It was from Miss Velma V. Vogelman of Baltimore, MD who knew Donald from his Naval Academy days. She had just learned of his death through LIFE magazine, and she was writing on the anniversary of a significant day.

“On July 4, 1940 he came to Baltimore and spent the day with me and my parents. This day I shall always remember as one of the happiest in my life. He spoke often of his home and parents and how he would have enjoyed spending that particular day with you in Albion, Ind.”

We had never heard of a mention of Uncle Donald in LIFE. So we used Google Books and quickly found it in print in the July 5, 1943 issue on page 21.

We’re looking forward to following up on other discoveries from the letters and clippings. What other interesting insights to history are waiting to be found?

Chelsea Clinton Family Forest Kinship

Being curious about Chelsea’s big wedding event this weekend, we wondered how many of her Family Forest relatives might be attending. So we ran a Family Forest kinship report to see who she is known to be related to so far, and we posted the celebrity-studded report at our website.

No surprise that the results include one US President and one US Senator, but the report also contains another US Senator, a US Secretary of the Treasury, a Canadian Prime Minister, and one member of the British Royal Family.

In addition there are one famous author, one famous economist, the Dionne quintuplets, two Grammy-winning singing stars and two other equally well-known performers, and a number of other Hollywood celebrities including two famous directors, one of the most famous Hollywood actresses today, three Oscar-winning actors, and a couple of other equally well-known actors.

We’re waiting to see how many of them attend the event at Astor Courts.

Best wishes to Chelsea on her special day.

Twilight and the White House

Thanks to Tamura Jones for pointing out in his article The Dracula Connection about the Ancestry.com story that the Family Forest National Treasure does what Ancestry.com cannot.

Vlad the Impaler, the person some people believe the character of Count Dracula is based on, is in the Family Forest® (PIN 562175), and unlike the misleading chart Ancestry.com used to illustrate their story (it’s actually missing many generations), Vlad’s Family Forest® charts can be explored generation-by-generation.

Anyone with the National Treasure can click on him, and request a 20-generation descendant chart. What leaps out to me on this chart is that one of Vlad the Impaler’s descendants was born in the White House!

If you click on Vlad the Impaler’s father Vlad the Devil (PIN 562178) and request a 20-generation descendant chart, you can see ancestral pathways that leads to the British Royal Family, the White House, actress Sarah Miles, and one of the people Madonna will be directing in her new movie, without skipping generations as Ancestry.com does.

And you can click here to see Ancestors-at-at-glance™ charts of some of the people in the Ancestry.com story.

One of my favorite ancestral mothers

Maybe it’s because she was the first of my ancestors I saw portrayed in a movie (The Lion in Winter), and maybe it’s because she was portrayed by one of Hollywood’s most beloved icons (Katharine Hepburn), but at or very near the top of the list of my favorite ancestral mothers is Eleanor of Aquitaine. 

She was married to a king of France and a king of England, and was the mother of at least ten children, including two of history’s most remembered kings, Richard the Lionhearted, and King John who signed the Magna Charta. 

Eleanor is a very key gateway ancestor. Her ancestral pathways lead back thousands of years to and through exciting ancient worlds, some of which are already being re-created in 3-D virtual environments.

She is probably an ancestral mother of everyone who reads this. You can see Eleanor’s Ancestors-at-a-glance™ here. 

Moms have been making it all possible since before recorded history, and that’s why we are proud to emphasize them so strongly in the National Treasure. Happy Mother’s Day Mom!