Actor Tom Cruise spent some time around Roscommon, Ireland, a few years back, researching his Irish roots. He apparently became quite attached to the old family farmstead, a 33-acre plot in Kilteveen.
Now he's in negotiation to buy it, according to the Athlone Advertiser newspaper.
The land was once owned by the actor's ancestors, the Mapother family. He was born Tom Cruise Mapother IV in New York in 1962. His great grandfather Thomas is believed to have come to America in the early 1900s.
"We're the house with the Viking out front." When Carrie Heiser of Duvall, Wash., started tracing her family roots several years ago, she had no idea where it might lead. When she discovered that her family's Icelandic roots stretched back to fabled Norse explorer Leif Erikson and beyond, she knew what to do.
She commissioned an artist to create a 6-foot-tall, 800-pound bust of Erikson's grandfather, Olafur the White. The concrete creation now guards the family driveway.
Heiser told the Seattle Times that her three children, ages 13, 17 and 26, didn't initially share her zeal for family history.
"They make fun of my Viking things," she said. "But now, with Olafur out there, they're intrigued. It put a face to this story I've been telling them."
She said it. "The older I get the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball–the further I am rolled the more I gain." ~ Susan B. Anthony.
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand -- Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
Flickr photo of Tom Cruise courtesy of Nancy Reimond.