Celebrity Genealogy      Research - My Family Ancestry

For some reason, I knew the name, but I had him completely wrong. I thought he was either a news anchor for one of the major American broadcasters or perhaps someone who appeared regularly on a talk show.

It was only after I started looking into who Matt Bomer actually was that I realized I'd seen him in movies and television shows several times. His name had simply never stuck with me as an actor.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think it may say something good about him as an actor.

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A Strange Talent for Remembering Surnames

For some reason, I’ve always been able to remember the surnames I’ve entered into my genealogy research. My family tree currently includes over 23,000 individuals, branching far beyond my direct ancestors to include aunts, uncles, cousins, and spouses.

It’s an odd but useful “superpower” that has helped me build out my ancestry records and uncover distant celebrity relatives. This is exactly what happened with Matt Bomer.

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How I Discovered Matt Bomer

My mind works in unusual ways. I can meet someone and forget their name seconds later, and I can drive down the same street for years without ever learning what the street is called.

But there are two things I apparently never forget: the car someone drives and surnames I've encountered in my family research.

My family tree now contains more than 23,000 people, so remembering every surname I've encountered over the years is a surprisingly useful talent.

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Matt Bomer's name immediately registered with me. Then I received a connection request on social media from someone claiming to be Matt Bomer. I knew the name. I checked my genealogy records. Sure enough, I'd already researched Matt Bomer and his family and they were sitting there in my family tree.

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The social-media account turned out to be fake, but it did something the impersonator probably never intended: it prompted me to finally investigate who Matt Bomer actually was and why his name was sitting in my family tree. And that's when things started to get interesting.

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Then Matt Mentioned Spring, Texas

As I started researching Matt Bomer, I came across something that made me immediate sit up; he frequently talks about growing up in Spring, Texas, and I recognized that name. Coincidentally, I had received a call only the day before from a potential client who was located in Spring, Texas. The person that called me was inquiring about the business that I founded and co-own with business partners that is located in Houston, Texas. Spring is a small town located north of Houston which Matt often describes as a "Friday Night Lights" type of town (reference to a movie of the same name) in which his stories about growing up there mirrored my growing up in a very blue collar industrial town about the same distance to Toronto and Spring is to Houston. I immediately felt a connection to someone who clearly had aspirations that outshined their childhood town. Funny though, all these years later I purposely moved away from the large urban center and into a small, historical town that offers a slower, more relaxed way of life. Unlike the song that Petula Clark made famous, "downtown" may be where the action is, but for me, downtown is now a visit, not a lifestyle!

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Who Is Matt Bomer?

If you've arrived here because you know the name but, like me when I first started researching him, cannot quite place the name, Matt Bomer is an American actor whose career has included television, film and stage work. I've seen him in several of his roles, including White Collar, Magic Mike, The Normal Heart and Fellow Travelers and many other TV and screen productions. I have yet to see him in a stage role, but I'm sure that his work is equally good as that was his original calling.

There is one thing I find particularly interesting about Bomer as an actor: I don't think about Matt Bomer, the actor, when I'm watching Matt Bomer act. This may sound strange, but what I mean by this is that I find Bomer's acting so character intensive that I forget who I am watching, and just watch the character that is on the screen; I don't see Matt Bomer as he becomes the character. For me, that's a surprisingly rare talent, and Bomer is one of only a few actors that give me that reaction.

This doesn't mean that I don't enjoy watching other actors, and there are many that I love to watch act as they play different characters in different roles, but watching an actor become the character is on a completely different level, at least to me.

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My Family Connection to Matt Bomer

According to my ancestry research, Matt Bomer is my 26th paternal cousin, 3 times removed. We share royal ancestry through King John I of England (Plantagenet) and Isabella of Angoulême, Queen Consort. The closest paternal connection on my side is through Henry of Huntingdon, Earl of of Huntingdon who was my 28x Great Grandfather and Matt's maternal 25x Great Grandfather.

This isn’t unusual for my genealogy work - I often discover distant connections to famous people. In fact, Matt Bomer may be as close as my 10th cousin, given how many overlapping family lines we share in the 19th and 20th centuries, and each of us had many relatives that were part of The Great Migration of the 1600's when the Puritans moved to "the new world". This is where my own paternal lineage starts in the new world, and it would appear that Matt's maternal family also arrived during that period. Since there were so few people in the original Colonies, more mixing of our bloodlines would have most likely occurred, but that discover remains to be proven.

That's one of the great things - and also a great frustration - with genealogy research; it can be a never ending search down a rabbit hole...but the discoveries more than make up for the hours of researching!

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Where the Rabbit Hole with Matt Bomer Lead Me

I am in no way finished my research yet with Matt and my family tree research as I'm convinced that there is at least 1 closer family tie hidden somewhere back in 17th century Colonial history. However, I did find a fun and interesting connection, one that I'm not sure even Matt Bomer himself know about: Matt and Steve McQueen are related. I say this as I remember an interview that I watched in which Matt mentioned that he was a fan of Steve McQueen. It turns out that Matt and Steve McQueen are related through their - and my - royal bloodlines going back at least as far as William the Conqueror. I don't have their exact cousin relationship worked out (that would require me charting each of their full family histories, something that, at least at this time in my life, I don't have the time to do), but they are definitely related. How much of his family history Matt Bomer actually knows, I have no idea, but it is certainly very well documented on his maternal line.

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​Famous Ancestors Shared with Matt Bomer

Like many of my distant celebrity relatives, Matt Bomer has an impressive lineage. Through my family history research, I’ve found that we share ancestry with:

• William the Conqueror

• Charlemagne

• Queen Elizabeth I

• Marilyn Monroe

• Clint Eastwood

• Humphrey Bogart

• Abigail Folger (of the Folgers Coffee family)

• Benedict Arnold

• President Thomas Jefferson

• Princess Diana, Prince William, and Prince Harry

• Steve McQueen 

• Jane & Peter Fonda

These aren't all necessarily relationships through the exact same ancestral family line, which is an important distinction in genealogy. They represent the various overlapping lines that I've researched. This is what makes the family tree interesting. Matt Bomer isn't simply a distant cousin of mine, he's one of the many points where several of my otherwise separate family history investigations begin to intersect.

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What I Enjoyed About Researching Matt Bomer

I started researching Matt because I recognized a name. I continued to research because I wanted to know why that name was familiar. Along the way I discovered an actor that I already knew, and whose work I had previously enjoyed. This lead me to the realization that his work was special in the way that his acting had been telling me stories without me realizing that it was one talented actor who had portrayed characters so well, that I remembered more about the characters than I had the actor himself.

Then I started to find relatable characteristics as I learned more about Matt Bomer. And, as happens quite often with my research, I found more connections through other distant family discoveries that I could tie together with my new discovery.

 

This is why I have enjoyed my journey all these years - I start researching one person and more often than not, I end up discovering more of my family history than I had expected to learn. And sometimes, like with Matt Bomer, I found someone who had already claimed his place in my family tree - I just hadn't realized it.