MyHeritage Says Sweeney and Monroe Are Distant Cousins

MyHeritage says its genealogical research has traced a distant family relationship between actors Sydney Sweeney and Marilyn Monroe, identifying them as ninth cousins, once removed, through a shared ancestor named Ezra Perry. The company’s account connects Sweeney’s family through her father, Steven Sweeney, and Monroe’s through her biological father, Charles Stanley Gifford. Roi Mandel, MyHeritage’s director of research, said the company looked for a family connection after noticing that Sweeney and Monroe had often been compared. He described the finding as a shared branch in the company’s archives and said the discovery showed how people can be connected through family trees. The five reports describing the finding rely on MyHeritage’s research and Mandel’s account. They do not provide the underlying family records or a separate genealogist’s assessment, so the relationship is best understood as the company’s reported conclusion rather than an independently documented verification in the available material. The shared ancestor, Ezra Perry, is described in the reports as an early settler in Sandwich, Massachusetts, who lived in the 1600s.