This star of ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ says her husband is related to Ben Affleck. The genealogy records we found tell a different story.

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.