Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Felix Mendelssohn are my very distant cousins? It's fun to play around on the ancestry.org website.

All of my life, I knew that my grandparents on my mother's side were from Russia. I was told many times that my mother's mother and father had left Russia when it became dangerous for them. That would have been around 1915 when they settled in Chicago.

What I didn't know until recently was that they were more specifically both from Ukraine. Of course, Ukraine had been part of/not part of Russia on and off for hundreds of years.

The other thing that I had never known until recently, and I don't believe my mother knew either, was that my grandmother's relatives going back a number of generations were from Poland.

I had never hear Poland mentioned anytime growing up, only Russia.

Enter the Katzenellenbogen family. Pronounced Katzen-Ellen-Bogen.

The Katzenellenbogens were a dynasty that was widely dispersed throughout Central and Eastern Europe beginning in the late 1400's. It began in a town of the same name located in Hesse, Germany. The Katzenellenbogens would find their way into Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia , Russia and many other countries as members of the family intermarried with other prominent Jewish families.

My mother's mother, my grandmother, has a Katzenellenbogen in her direct ancestry.

The Katzenellenbogens would eventually have three descendants who were famous or infamous. Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Felix Mendelssohn. Although removed many hundreds of times from me making it more a fantasy than reality, it is still fun now to say, "somewhere in my family tree, I've got that sex-obsessed psychiatrist, that #1 Communist, and a great classical composer!"