Mookie Betts and Meghan Markle Are Distant Cousins Who Have Very Different Lives

Although they're both famous, you wouldn't necessarily think that baseball player Mookie Betts and former royal Meghan Markle have all that much in common. Ever since Meghan became a royal, though, there has been plenty of investigative work done into her genealogical history, and it's turned up some interesting results about other famous people she is related to.

Mookie is one of the people who has long been rumored to be an actual relative of Meghan's. Here's what we know about whether that's actually the case.

According to a 2018 story in The Boston Globe, amateur genealogist Jim McNiff discovered two ties between Moookie's family and Meghan's. Jim, who is known in Boston for his deep research into the genealogy of Boston athletes, discovered that Mookie and Meghan's families first link up roughly 150 years ago.

According to census records, Mookie and Meghan's great-great-grandfathers, Joseph and Jacob Betts, lived next door to one another on a plantation in Madison County, Ala.

It's unclear whether the two were related to one another in any way, but that's not the only tie the two families share. Katie and Richard Betts married in 1920, and Katie is Meghan's great-great-aunt, while Richard is Mookie's great-great-uncle. That means that, by marriage, the two of them are distant cousins.

Of course, they aren't the kind of cousins you would run into at a family reunion, but still.

When he learned the news, Mookie responded by saying that he would like to meet her. “I wonder if she’s a baseball fan,” Mookie said at the time.

Mookie and Meghan did eventually meet in 2019, and they were able to bond over their shared heritage, and the ways that heritage had led them to the fame that each of them was now enjoying in totally different ways.

When the two did meet, it was at a Red Sox game being played in London. “I didn’t know she was coming. I knew [Prince Harry] was coming,” Betts said, Mookie said at the time. “I told her about the story and she laughed and gave me a hug. She didn’t know about it. They probably didn’t believe it.”

Meghan may not have known about their shared ancestry, but it does speak to the different ancestry that Meghan brought with her into the royal family. While most people in the family are either royal or were born to well-known British families, Meghan's family is much more diverse. Meghan famously dealt with immense tension during her time inside the family, and many believe she was treated poorly at least partly because of her race.

Meghan and Mookie's shared ancestry is an amazing story, but it also speaks to how recent the history of oppression is in America and the ways in which its tendrils have extended into modern life. Racism is still alive and well, and if Meghan's stories are to be believed it, exists even inside the royal family.