 George R.R. Martin |
 Larry Davidson |
People have often claimed that I look like George R.R. Martin. I always thought that they were just paying attention to the beard, the suspenders, and the physique — but now I know of another fact that suggests that there’s actually a small chance that we may in fact be related.
Last night I watched the first episode of this season of Skip Gates’s show, Finding Your Roots, on PBS. This episode featured Andy Samberg and George R.R. Martin. You’ll have to watch the show — and I highly recommend that you do so — in order to learn why these two dissimilar entertainers were paired together in the same episode, but I just need to address the question of Martin’s ancestry. Long ago I heard that he was something like 3/4 British and 1/4 Italian, or maybe half and half. But DNA evidence revealed that Martin is not at all Italian but is 1/4 Eastern European of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry! As my own ancestry is at least 93% Eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish, he and I may be related! We will leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what the probability is.
Learning Strategies 