And now, the show about a group of Mormon influencers has yet another controversy — this one involving Ben Affleck.
Well, Ben Affleck probably shouldn’t be involved at all (more on that later). But cast member Jennifer Affleck, 25, who’s married to Zac Affleck, a med student from Utah, brought up their matching surnames in an early episode of the show, saying that Zac’s father is a first cousin of Ben Affleck. This would make Zac Ben’s first cousin once removed. (Zac and Ben’s respective kids would be second cousins.)
She presented the details slightly differently in a 2022 TikTok video in which she references Jennifer Lopez’s marriage to Ben Affleck and says in the caption that Zac and Ben are second cousins. To be fair, whether they’re first cousins once removed or second cousins is a little hazy, and the distinction is confusing to most people. The point is that Jen is out here claiming family ties to Ben Affleck.
She’s reiterated the family connection to “The Accountant” star in more recent interviews, too. She told People magazine: “Zac’s dad has [met them], when [Ben] was very little … I’m hoping to meet him one day, too!”
But fans of the show started to wonder if this wasn’t entirely true. On Reddit, people noticed that Ben’s father didn’t have any brothers who shared the same name as Zac’s grandfather (Zac’s father, Dave Affleck, appears briefly on an episode of the show). They looked a few generations back, and couldn’t find any link between the two families.
Ben Affleck’s ancestors hail from Scotland
AP Photo/Chris Pizzello
It just so happens that I am both an avid fan of the Hulu show, and had already traced Ben Affleck’s family tree on Ancestry.com for fun several years ago.
In 2015, there was a minor scandal when it was revealed that Ben Affleck had pressured producers of the PBS genealogy show “Finding Your Roots” to edit out any mention of a slave-owning ancestor.
As a genealogy buff myself who has occasionally tried doing celebrity family trees for fun, I was curious. (The slave owner turned out to be a great-great-great grandfather on his mother’s side).
With that work already done, I was already halfway there with being able to verify a cousin relationship with the reality star.
Though Ben and Casey Affleck are famously from Boston, their Affleck side of the family is not from Massachusetts. Their father and grandfather, Myron Affleck, Jr., were born in Rhode Island. The next two generations back of Afflecks were from Yonkers, New York. Finally, we get to William Affleck, born in 1824 in Glasgow, Scotland, who immigrated to Yonkers in 1848 and worked in the railroad industry, according to his 1906 obituary in The New York Times.
Meanwhile, on Zac Affleck’s side, his male Affleck ancestors have been in Utah for generations.
In my search, I found no overlap or common ancestry between the two Affleck families in the United States going back to the 1800s.
(For transparency, information about Zac’s living father and grandfather came from newspaper notices and other public records. For older generations, I looked at U.S. Census records, birth and death records, and other records available on Ancestry.com).
Zac Affleck’s ancestors had strong ties to powerful Mormons
Zac Affleck’s family does have a very interesting history, arguably far more interesting than merely being related to a famous actor. The Affleck family arrived in Utah sometime between 1871 and 1880 from the city of Preston in Lancashire, England. Preston is notable for having the oldest continually running congregation of the LDS church. The Preston branch was established by missionaries in 1837 — a decade before the Mormons settled in Utah in 1847.
William Preston Affleck was born in 1801 in Scotland and moved to England sometime before 1825, eventually settling in Preston. According to a written family history by a relative, William converted to the new religion after meeting missionaries there. Although he died before being able to leave England, he urged his children and wife to go to “Zion” (Utah), where they settled.
Other branches of Zac’s family also have deep roots in the church. His fifth great-grandfather, William Smith Muir, was born in Scotland in 1822. Muir was part of the Mormons who followed Joseph Smith to Nauvoo, Illinois, and later went to Utah. Muir was a notable pioneer, enough so that there is a 166-page family history written about him as well as a children’s coloring book about him.
It’s impossible to say definitively that Zac Affleck and Ben Affleck are not very distant cousins. It’s possible they shared a common relative in Scotland from before 1800. As Scottish surnames go, Affleck isn’t the most common, but it’s also not incredibly rare (I have a great-great-grandparent with the last name Affleck, for example) and there are Afflecks all over the world.
While sharing a last name is a pretty good clue that there may be a family connection somewhere in history, it’s not certain. The origins of the Affleck surname date back to the 1200s, so there are centuries of potential for a common ancestor of the two separate William Afflecks of the 1800s whose descendants, 200 years later, would end up on reality TV and in movies.
What the public records show, however, is that Zac Affleck and Ben Affleck are not second cousins, or third cousins, or even fourth cousins.
Business Insider reached out to reps for Zac, Jen, and Ben Affleck, but did not receive a response.
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