Not an ancestor quite, but P.T. Barnum is a distantly-related cousin. The genealogical research I’ve done has found conflicting accounts of the Barnum family tree and depending which is correct (assuming either one is correct), I’m something like a 4th cousin 4 times removed or a 2nd cousin 6 times removed to P.T. or something like that. (I don’t remember precisely.)
My grandmother was a Barnum by blood but adopted into another family in infancy. She met her birth mother once but didn’t get any information about her father’s identity. After her mother died, we made contact with some of her living mother’s-side relatives and got to know them. They were very gracious and welcoming, but they also had no clues as to my grandmother’s biological father’s identity. Ancestry DNA finally gave us a piece to the puzzle that narrowed the search for the identity of my grandmother’s biological father down to two brothers, both named Barnum. (One was a little closer to my grandmother’s mother’s age, so seems slightly more likely, but we can’t be certain.) My grandmother was in her eighties when she finally got some amount of closure on that particular family mystery.
Finding out my family is related to circus folk explains a lot, honestly. (Kidding. Kidding. That’s just a joke. Lol.)
Not an ancestor quite, but P.T. Barnum is a distantly-related cousin. The genealogical research I’ve done has found conflicting accounts of the Barnum family tree and depending which is correct (assuming either one is correct), I’m something like a 4th cousin 4 times removed or a 2nd cousin 6 times removed to P.T. or something like that. (I don’t remember precisely.)
My grandmother was a Barnum by blood but adopted into another family in infancy. She met her birth mother once but didn’t get any information about her father’s identity. After her mother died, we made contact with some of her living mother’s-side relatives and got to know them. They were very gracious and welcoming, but they also had no clues as to my grandmother’s biological father’s identity. Ancestry DNA finally gave us a piece to the puzzle that narrowed the search for the identity of my grandmother’s biological father down to two brothers, both named Barnum. (One was a little closer to my grandmother’s mother’s age, so seems slightly more likely, but we can’t be certain.) My grandmother was in her eighties when she finally got some amount of closure on that particular family mystery.
Finding out my family is related to circus folk explains a lot, honestly. (Kidding. Kidding. That’s just a joke. Lol.)