We’re related, if you squint really hard:

You know those people who claim they’re vaguely related to someone famous? As in “My grandmother’s neighbor’s hairdresser once cut Brad Pitt’s hair when he was a boy!” Well, through Geni, I discovered my famous relative is Vincent van Gogh.

Van Gogh is my great uncle’s (on my mother’s side) first cousin’s husband’s second cousin’s wife’s first cousin’s wife’s husband’s brother. Turns out I’m about eight degrees of separation from Vincent van Gogh. Which makes him basically family. Maybe that’s not blood related, but it’s still crazy to think our history is actually tangled up together.

The chain is a string of in-law and extended connections. I get that “Great uncle’s first cousin” could be blood-related, but when you start adding husbands, wives, and second cousins, you’re moving into marriage-based links. By the time we reach “wife’s first husband’s brother,” we’re in territory that’s family-by-association, not family-by-blood.

Who cares?! The link is definitely there. The path looks like this:

Linda K. Sienkiewicz →Thelma Nerva (my mother 1921-2013) → Hilja Stenberg (her mother 1883-1955) → Alina Bergkankku (her sister 1874-1940) → Johan Korpela (her husband 1868-1937) → Anna Sophia Sältö (his mother 1838-1912) → Erik Fågelström (her brother 1841-1922) → Johanna Söderström (his daughter 1881-1944) → Torsten Söderström (her husband 1880-1920) → Fanny Söderström (his mother 1859-1934) → Gustaf Kjellman  (her father 1803-1884) → Ulrika Kjellman (his sister 1816-1858) → Fredrik Brummer (her son 1848-1904) → Armas Brummer (his son- 1882-1946) → Martha Gosschalk (his wife 1880-1960) → Henri Gosschalk (her father 1843-1916) → Christina Gosschalk (his sister 1845-1926) → Johan Cohen Gosschalk (her son 1873-1912) → Johanna Bonger (his wife 1826-1925) → Theo van Gogh (her first husband 1857-1891 → Vincent van Gogh (his brother 1853-1890)

The interesting twist

You may wonder how my Finnish family got mixed up with Dutch. It happened when renowned Finnish artist Armas Aleksander Brummer fell in love with Martha Gosschalk from the Netherlands. Brummer was a member of the Artists’ Association of Finland and exhibited his work in Amsterdam and Antwerp in 1931. He moved to the Netherlands and lived in The Hague from 1910 to 1943, where he met and married Martha!

♫ We Are Family ♫

How exciting to think Vincent van Gogh is my 24th cousin once removed! True, it’s like being connected through an eight-handshake chain at a wedding reception, but if we were living at the same time, you can bet we’d be attending that wedding.

It’s a fascinating reminder of how we’re all connected in unexpected ways through history, love, and a complicated family tree.

The really cool part is the art aspect: I went to art school in the mid-seventies. I know my way around a paintbrush. There are actually several artists in my immediate family, so you could say Vincent and my family do share something, maybe not in blood, but in brushstrokes.

The next time I’m in an art museum, maybe in Amsterdam, I’m going to stare hard at one of his self-portraits and whisper, “Hey, cuz! I see you!”

Thank you for visiting! Author Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a wrangler of words and big messy feelings. Her second novel, Love and Other Incurable Ailments, is coming October 27, 2026, from Regal House Publishing: When love letters from a despondent stranger land in her lap, an anxious overthinker becomes convinced she’s the cure, and sets off to save him, and herself, blissfully armed with nothing but magical thinking.
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