I was playing around on a genealogy website and I came across an interesting discovery:
Anne Frank is my second great uncle’s uncle’s wife’s sister’s husband’s nephew’s wife’s first cousin once removed’s wife’s great-niece. Now, I wasn’t sure I believed this so I took out paper and pen and drew out the family connection. Here it is:
Vertical lines are drawn between parent and child. Horizontal lines indicate marriages. Lines that go up-over-down again link siblings. I am the little circle in the bottom left corner and Anne Frank is the lowest circle on the right hand side of the page. This “family” represents individuals from seven generations and it crosses over five marriages and six sets of siblings.
What does this mean? Nothing really. The connection is distant to say the least. However, in the big picture it is interesting. My mother and Anne Frank both lived in Amsterdam and both spent part of the war in the same camp at the same time. My mother remembers seeing her (although she wasn’t the famous author of a diary at the time). Part of me wonders how many of these intermediary relatives were also in Westerbork. How many perished? How many survived?
K Heidi Fishman (Popje and Me) 
Glad to see your genogram skills intact!
LikeLike
this sounds like an advanced math course and can not be healthy for your brains
Sent from my iPad
LikeLike
That’s interesting, are you planning to find out more?
LikeLike
Coline:
My book is well underway. The research keeps turning up new things, so I don’t know what information will make it in the book and what will be “interesting facts that need to wait for later.” Anne Frank does make a cameo appearance in my book as my mother did cross paths with her. As far as all the relatives in between, I’m not sure yet.
Thanks for following.
Heidi
LikeLike
That sounds like an interesting book; I would like to read it when you finish it.
LikeLike
I hope to publish it in the future. I’ll keep my progress updated on my blog. Thank you.
LikeLike
Thank you.
LikeLike
Very interesting, I will definitely be interested in buying a copy of your book when it is published.
Six years ago I began exploring our own family’s genealogy and discovered that a paternal side gr-grandmother’s name was Elizabeth Frank. Later I found that she was the daughter of a Joseph Frank who owned a mill in Auffenau, Germany. Joseph’s father, also named Joseph, was born in Frankfurt-am Main, Germany, which made me wonder if he could be related to Otto Frank.
But having the Frank name and being born in Frankfurt-am-Main might be just coincidence, as that surname is quite common. The only way to know for one way or the other, absent a paper trail, is via Y-DNA testing. If there are any direct paternal line male descendants of Otto’s two brothers, the Y haplogroup, subclade, and STR markers could be established, and compared with other males sharing the Frank surname.
LikeLiked by 1 person