Join the World’s Largest Family Reunion!

Where will you be on June 6, 2015?

Author A.J. (“AJ”) Jacobs has plans and he wants you to join him — at the largest family reunion in history!

(Image credit: United Purpose)

A.J. Jacobs is a journalist, an editor-at-large at Esquire magazine, and author of four New York Times bestsellers. He gave a TED talk about what he learned while writing his book, “The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible”.

AJ is on a mission to break the Guinness world record, by producing the world’s largest family reunion in history. The current record for the largest family reuinion is held by the Porteau-Boileve family in France, with 4,514 relatives in 2012. His quest was reported in the New York Times and he has been interviewed at NPR and Extreme Genes.

Family history is all about discovery and bringing people together, to preserve a common heritage.

AJ’s family history journey began a few months ago. He was contacted by one of his readers in Israel, who claimed that his wife was AJ’s eighth cousin. He told AJ about some of his other discoveries, such as being related to Karl Marx and famous European aristocrats.

AJ was intrigued. Like many MyHeritage users, he was bitten by the “genealogy bug”. Quickly, he was motivated to try to find out as much information about his family and unknown relatives as possible.

Using MyHeritage and Geni, AJ made some incredible discoveries of his own. He discovered that he is related to Gwyneth Paltrow, albeit 17 steps away. He is also distantly related to Quincy Jones, Michael R. Bloomberg, and many, many others.

AJ is continuing his family history research, with hopes to grow his family tree with far-reaching branches. He will be writing a book about his journey and his findings, as well as the mega-reunion event! AJ has already booked the venue for his global family reunion, the New York Hall of Science in Queens, on the grounds of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs.

Here, at MyHeritage, we’ll be following AJ’s journey, as he collects relatives, discovers new-found bonds with people worldwide, and plans and creates the world’s largest global family reunion, next June.

Do you think you might be related to A.J. Jacobs?

See how you can get involved and sign up for his mega family reunion: http://ajjacobs.com/global-family-reunion/