What do Elvis Presley and I Have in Common?
Anna Christiana Frantzel. You may not know her name but you know two of her descendants.
For the last few days, I haven’t felt like writing. At all. Comments were sufficient for me. Twitter is dead. There’s nothing new under the sun on this platform to read (thank you glitches) so I did the nest best thing. I’ve been working on my family tree. Many of you who are new to the Terry Express may not know that I’ve been shocked more than once by whom I’ve discovered that I am related to. I created my own publication to place my discoveries. Writing about these people and what it means to be related to them is on my To-Do List for Some Day.
Technically, I am Terry Lynn Cooper, duchess of Hereford. I own a piece of land across the pond the size of a postage stamp but it is mine nonetheless. All the years of my growing up on a farm and helping out other relatives with their farm work when we were caught up, I had just assumed that we had been since the beginning of time, hunters and gatherers.
Boy was I ever wrong.
I have come to discover that I am French, German, English, Irish, Native American, Scandanavian, and a host of others. Yesterday I discovered that I have at least two German Jews on my tree so that is now on my To-Do List. I want to deep dive and see if they were around at the time of the Holocaust and if that’s why they came here to the US.
I recently discovered that yet another ancestor was a character in a Shakespeare play. One of my ancestors was used to base the story of maid Marion on. I am descended from accused and accusers of the Salem Witch Trials. Royals, nobles, poets, authors, you name it.
But today? It isn’t even 10 am EST and I’ve already had my mind blown. I was in a relative’s ancestry record and I noticed a certain image in the “hints”. Hints are the dancing green leaves you see in the Ancestry commercials and YouTube videos. The image was tiny and grainy but the image was familiar. Too familiar. Like the image of someone that almost anyone would recognize.
Let me just say that 99% of the time I find images that have been added by Ancestry users all over the globe unbelievably annoying as hell. Any ancestor that sailed to America has either a likeness to the Mayflower or a pilgrim as their profile picture. I hate that. That isn’t who they are. I wind up hitting the ignore button on the majority of them. One chick in particular? Holy shit balls. Every time she came across a guy who had been knighted she had no less than 15 Google images of knights, the knights’ creed, the knights’ code, etc. attached to every. single. one. of. them.
#annoyingasfuck
But this morning’s image had me doing the “nuh-uh” in my head. It can’t be. No way. Say waaat? Nah, man. I looked at the surname. I had already seen about a dozen variations of it.
Bressler, Blessler, Preslar Pressler, Breßler, and all of the variations thereof. So I began working in the opposite direction than I normally work. Anyone who has ever worked on a family tree knows that you start at the bottom (you) and work your way up the tree which means you’re going back in time. Parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc. This time I was working back closer to my generation on this one branch just to see what I could see. And then it happened. The name that had me holding my breath as I researched.
Presley.
I came upon the name Presley in the tree. The image I had seen earlier was that of none other than Elvis Aaron Presley.
So yes, Elvis and I are somehow related. My life is now complete. Mom is no doubt rolling in her grave right now. Okay, she was cremated but you catch my drift. She LOVED Elvis and played his music all the time. And it’s on her side of the tree is where the connection is located.
I did a Google search for his family tree and this was one of the hits.
A PDF file from the Sweeny Texas History. Take note of the second name from the very top. Here’s a close-up.
Yep. My 11th great-grandmother. More than likely Elvis and I are cousins. I’m going to be spending the day finding out how. Then I guess I’m going to have to add Graceland to my places to visit after the first of the new year.
If you’d like to read more about cuz there’s a lot to read but you can always start with old faithful.
