Ninth Cousins, Once Removed — The Sydney Sweeney–Marilyn Monroe Kinship Claim and the Empty Ledger of Its Verification

Nine. First comes a number — nine. Then comes a phrase most readers skim past: 'ninth cousins, once removed'. Last spring the genealogy company MyHeritage announced that the actress Sydney Sweeney and the Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe were blood relatives — their common ancestor being Ezra Perry, a seventeenth-century settler. The headlines went out, the social feeds filled up. But the moment I laid the claim on my desk, the question I ask of every claim surfaced: who counted the number, and who audited the ledger? I practise journalism with documents. Paper, numbers, and a chain of custody — those three are my tools. In Moscow I once held twenty-one pages of WADA correspondence and ninety-eight sample IDs, and every one of those IDs had to be checked against three separate databases. On Everton's Bramley-Moore Dock I sifted forty-seven pages of contracts and 3.2 gigabytes of planning emails, watched six hours of council tapes, and traced a shadow behind every payment. That habit did the work here. When the MyHeritage announcement landed, I did not read the headline — I asked where the claim's certificate was. What MyHeritage is matters. It is a commercial genealogy platform — users build family trees, send DNA kits, and search archives. A large share of its revenue comes from subscriptions and DNA kits. That does not make its work fake; it means its celebrity 'discoveries' are not knowledge alone but also marketing. When one party runs the research, announces the finding, and plants its own brand in the headline, calling it neutral history becomes hard. The genre of celebrity genealogy is not new. MyHeritage has published such claims before — attempts to link a star to a historical figure. The logic is simple: a celebrity connection makes a viral story, and every share of that story spreads the brand. This is not paid advertising — it is 'earned media', publicity won without buying space. The question is not one of ethics but of method. I want to know what independent verification precedes such an announcement. The answer is usually — none. There is another layer. Marilyn Monroe is a cultural icon in herself, and Sydney Sweeney is one of modern Hollywood's brightest names — her work from 'Euphoria' to 'The Housemaid' has been widely discussed. Monroe's cult image from 'The Seven Year Itch', her waves of hair, her red lipstick — these are among Hollywood's most recognisable pictures. So the pull of finding a 'connection' between two stars is easy to understand. But understanding the pull and verifying the claim are two different jobs. The media often does the first and skips the second. First, let me understand the number. 'First cousins' means the children of two siblings. 'Second cousins' means the grandchildren of two siblings. With each step the common ancestor moves back a generation, and the number of possible relatives grows geometrically. At the ninth-cousin stage the common ancestor sits seven or eight generations back — in Ezra Perry's case, the seventeenth century, ten or eleven generations ago. Once you reach that distance the argument becomes: almost every Western descendant is connected to almost every other descendant in some way. 'Ninth cousins' is not a rare bond — it is the rule of statistics. Here the phrase 'once removed' stretches the distance further: one generation of separation between the two people. In a headline it sounds thrilling; in genealogical terms it is nearly meaningless. And here lies my central objection: the greater the distance, the greater the need for verification, yet in this claim the level of verification runs precisely the other way. The research was run by an interested party, the result was announced by that same party, and the 'ninth cousin' connection has not been independently peer-reviewed in the genealogy world. On my checklist that is an empty box. The files were not hidden — they were just never read independently. Now to blockchain, because many place false expectations there. In modern genealogy some projects talk of putting family trees and DNA records on-chain. The idea is elegant: the ledger is immutable, no one can later alter an entry, and every addition is time-stamped. I am myself a fan of the immutable ledger — in my notebook every document carries a number, every file a hash, so that no one can later claim the page changed. But here is a hard truth: a blockchain does not verify the truth of what it records. It only says, 'this entry was submitted this way at this time'. It does not say, 'this entry is true'. In technology this is called the 'oracle problem'. Data inside the blockchain is safe, but bringing data in from the outside world requires a trusted party. Who is that party? In this claim, MyHeritage itself. So the situation stands: the same party is running the research, announcing the result, and if that result were also put on-chain, it would be recording — not proving. An immutable ledger and a true ledger are not the same thing. Put garbage in and it stays garbage forever; it is only that no one can now delete it. The spreadsheet accused no one. It only refused to forget. I remember my Moscow sample IDs. Ninety-eight IDs, each checked against three databases, each verification carrying a time-stamp. An ID does not become credible merely because it sits in a ledger — credibility comes from the collection process: who took the sample, where it was sealed, who transferred it, and where the paperwork of that transfer lives. The same rule holds in genealogy. Who built the family tree, from which archive, using which birth and death records, and where the originals of those records are — without answers to these questions the tree is a claim, not proof. The accounts had no auditor, but every transfer left a shadow. I notice something else. Announcements like this tend to pick one particular generational line, the one that looks most dramatic. A settler like Ezra Perry is chosen — because he has a documented history, a vast number of descendants, and he carries a story of 'early America'. In genealogy this is a familiar tactic: pulling the tree toward the famous ancestor, where the records are easiest to find. But the other branches of the same family, the ones with thin records, are left aside. So the tree is a selected part of reality — not the whole truth, but a chosen truth. And a chosen truth carries a danger: no one asks who did the choosing. Then comes the styling question, and here the story becomes clearer to me. Sydney Sweeney's stylist, Molly Dickson, reportedly admitted that some of the red-carpet looks were deliberately Monroe-inspired. If true, the situation grows more complicated. Because then the resemblance is not accidental — it is manufactured. That is, part of the 'similarity' the article describes was constructed. A wardrobe choice is a conscious decision, and when it merges into a story of 'natural resemblance', the reader lands in a circular argument: someone builds the resemblance, then that resemblance is shown as evidence. Blockchain offers no fix here — because the problem lies in the truth of the entry, not the structure of the ledger. Now the place where I disagree with the common analysis. Many will say this story is harmless entertainment — why go so deep? I say this is exactly where the real lesson sits. Because the problem is not this particular star or this particular claim — the problem is method, and method returns again and again. Today it is genealogy, tomorrow a sports transfer claim, the day after an institution's 'research'. Where the source is interested, the media's job is not merely to print the result — it is to mark the source's interest. Many think blockchain or a digital certificate solves this. To my mind the opposite is true. A lack of evidence cannot be papered over with technology; technology can, rather, make a false claim look more credible, because the phrase 'on-chain' reads to a casual reader as 'verified'. Confusing these two things — recording and verifying — is the biggest information gap of this era. When I get a document, I first ask who wrote it, why they wrote it, and who profited by writing it. In this claim the answer is the same: whoever wrote it, profited. So this is advertising more than news. I have another disagreement with readers who say, 'the stars may not really be relatives, but the story is fun'. Let it be fun, but when the word 'research' sits in the headline, the reader assumes some neutral method did the work. That trust is unfounded here. One result, one source, zero independent verification — that is not a discovery, it is a claim. And filling the gap between claim and proof is the journalist's duty, not the institution's. I end with a question, because I do not hold the answer, but the question deserves to be on the record. If tomorrow MyHeritage announces that another star is a tenth cousin of another legend, what will we do — print the headline, or ask where the certificate is? In my notebook every document still carries a number, and beside every claim an empty box, where 'independent verification' has to be written. If that box stays empty, the claim stays a claim. Blockchain or paper — a ledger that does not audit itself keeps memory, not truth. In the end the real hero of this story is not MyHeritage, nor Marilyn Monroe — the real subject is that empty box. The genre of celebrity genealogy will continue, more viral headlines will come, more 'discoveries' will be announced. But until someone independently checks the certificate, every such announcement is only a well-arranged claim — the more beautiful it is, the less verified. Attraction without verification means truth without attraction.