Amelia Rose Earhart, who recently appeared at a news conference at EAA AirVenture to announce a round-the-world flight in a Pilatus PC-12, said this week she has discovered she is not at all related to the original Amelia Earhart, whom her parents named her after. “After hiring a team of researchers, I learned today that though we share a name and a love of flight, the first Amelia Earhart and I are not from the same family,” Earhart wrote in a Facebook post. Earhart also said she had hired a genealogist 10 years ago who confirmed that she “shared a distant common ancestry” with the famous aviator. The new knowledge won’t affect her commitment to aviation, she said.
“While the news was a jolt, it DOES NOT change my commitment to the [round-the-world] flight or to the mission of The Fly With Amelia Foundation, which is to enable young girls to pursue their dreams of flight,” she wrote. The Foundation provides flight scholarships to girls ages 16 to 18, flight-based educational curriculum, and various opportunities for people to get involved in aviation. Earhart, who lives in Denver, flew from Oakland, Calif., to Miami in a Cirrus SR-22 in 2011, to re-trace one of Amelia Earhart’s famous flights.
