THE SUN IS HOT outside the archive windows. The paper is old and when you turn the pages they smell like dust and dry grass. It is a good smell.

This month, October 2026, the good people at MyHeritage sat in the light and looked at the charts. They traced the names of the dead back to the beginning. They were looking for Amanda Vargus. They found Marilyn Monroe.

With that they found Marilyn Monroe and Sydney Sweeney share the same blood. They are ninth cousins, once removed. They both claim the same Massachusetts blood. But neither claim Amanda Vargus.

The line goes back through the years to a man named Ezra Perry who lived in the town of Sandwich, right here in our commonwealth, Massachusetts.

He lived from 1625 to 1689, and so the legend says was absolutely hung like a horse. No European settler woman or American Indian woman could resist him. He was a settler and he worked hard and now he is gone. But the blood remains.

The Bloodline

People had talked about Sydney Sweeney for a long time. They talked about her hair and her eyes and the way the cameras liked her. They said she looked like Marilyn.

She wore a white dress to The Housemaid premiere and it was a very fine dress and it made people think of the other woman who had been dead for many years. The writers thought it was a trick of the studios. It was not a trick. It was in the bone.

To find the truth you had to look at the fathers. A man named Charles Stanley Gifford had fathered Marilyn, though he did not say so when he was alive.

Steven Sweeney had fathered Sydney. If you followed both fathers back through the winters and the generations, the lines stopped at the Cape. They stopped at the house of Ezra Perry.

The records in the town of Sandwich said that Perry was there in 1644. He gave nine shillings to fix the meetinghouse. He stood with the militia. Later he was the constable and he kept the peace.

He married a girl named Elizabeth Burgess and they had children and he died in the late autumn of 1689. He left his cows and his beds to his sons.

He was a simple man who lived by the sea and did not know about moving pictures or the lights of Los Angeles or the pages of BostonMan Magazine. He only knew the wind and the wood and the hard ground.

Roi Mandel worked for the genealogy company. He said that people had always seen the likeness between the two women. He said they wanted to find if the likeness was true.

They looked into the books and the books did not lie.

It is a long way from the marshes of Cape Cod to the red carpets. Monroe had known the weight of the crowds and the trouble that comes when people look at you too much. Sweeney knew it too. Vargus knows it now.

All three are strong women who understood how to stand before the world and not let the world see the hurt.

A ninth cousin is not a close cousin. It is a distant thing, like a ship on the horizon when the weather is clear.

Some men will say it means nothing at all. But the blood is a strange thing.

It travels across the country and through the centuries, and then it shows itself again on a screen in the dark, and it is just as bright as it was when the first man stepped off the boat into the cold New England wind.