Sydney Sweeney Discovers She Is Marilyn Monroe's Ninth Cousin
MyHeritage traced both family trees to a single 1600s Massachusetts settler ... Sweeney spent the last year wearing Monroe's clothes in ads. Now there's a footnote.
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A genealogy study by MyHeritage has confirmed what Sydney Sweeney's advertising strategy has spent a year implying: she and Marilyn Monroe are actually related. Per the platform's research, the two are ninth cousins, once removed, connected through a common ancestor who lived in Massachusetts four centuries ago.
The shared ancestor is Ezra Perry, an early settler in Sandwich, Massachusetts who died in 1689. MyHeritage traced Sweeney's lineage through her father, Steven Sweeney, and Monroe's through her biological father, Charles Stanley Gifford, both back to Perry roughly ten generations out.
"People have always drawn parallels between Sydney Sweeney and Marilyn Monroe, but seeing their paths align on a deeper level..." said Roi Mandel, MyHeritage Director of Research, in a statement reported by Consequence. MyHeritage did not finish the thought in the quoted excerpt, but the implication is clear enough.
A year of playing the Monroe card
The timing is almost too convenient. Sweeney has spent the last year in a sustained cycle of comparison to Monroe: the "blonde bombshell" framing in the Novig betting ad controversy, the general aesthetic of her brand partnerships, and a specific sartorial detail that got attention earlier this year. Consequence noted that Sweeney wore a vintage Ceil Chapman gown nearly identical to one Monroe wore in 1952.
Critics of her Novig campaign called her positioning calculated, a deliberate invocation of Monroe's bombshell image stitched to a sports betting platform. Supporters said the comparison was reductive. Both sides were, it turns out, arguing about a woman who shares actual DNA with the reference point.
Neither Sweeney nor her representatives have commented publicly on the genealogy finding.
What MyHeritage does with these
The company has a track record of rolling out celebrity genealogy connections for earned media. Per TMZ, MyHeritage previously identified Friends co-stars Matthew Perry and Courteney Cox as distant cousins and found a familial connection between Taylor Swift and Louis XIV.
Each of those findings generated a news cycle. The Sweeney-Monroe connection is their best one yet in terms of built-in context: the subject has spent months in headlines partly defined by the Monroe comparison, so the genealogy reveal has narrative pull that a random celebrity pairing would not.
The question now is whether Sweeney's team uses it. The Ceil Chapman gown was almost certainly a conscious callback. The Novig ad aesthetics were deliberate. A ninth-cousin footnote confirmed by a genealogy platform is an easier talking point than anything a publicist could invent ... and this one arrived from outside.
The ad strategy that critics called imitation just got a family tree.
Sources & further reading
- TMZ: Sydney Sweeney Is Related To Marilyn Monroe (Oct 7, 2026)
- Consequence: Sydney Sweeney and Marilyn Monroe Are Distant Cousins (Oct 7, 2026)
- Washington Times: Sydney Sweeney, Marilyn Monroe are distant cousins, genealogy study finds (Oct 7, 2026)
- Just Jared: Sydney Sweeney and Marilyn Monroe Are Distant Cousins, New Genealogy Research Finds (Oct 7, 2026)
- MyHeritage genealogy platform
