Mary Beth Webb, from Murrysville, Pennsylvania, is making some tall claims about her ancestry. She considers herself to be the 64th great-granddaughter of Saint Joseph Ben Matthat Arimathaea, who is considered to be Virgin Mary’s paternal uncle. So that makes her the Virgin Mary’s cousin, 65 times removed.
Mary has been looking into her ancestry since 2010, and it has taken her two years to spot her connection to Saint Joseph. Saint Joseph of Arimathaea is credited in the Bible for providing the tomb in which Jesus Christ’s body was placed after his execution on the cross.
The idea to research her ancestry came from her other bizarre ritual – speaking to the dead. When she lost her brother to cancer in 1999, she started communicating with him and also with her dead parents. Mary’s cousin was always the medium for these conversations – she conveyed messages from Mary’s parents that included details she could never have known about. Mary herself admitted that there was no way her cousin could have known some of the stories.
“My cousin and I have always had, like, this intuitiveness of being able to talk to people beyond Earth,” Mary said. She has thousands of notes to back up her story, recording every conversation she has ever had with her dead family. “We would ask questions about heaven, what it was like when you crossed over. I’ve gotten a really detailed account of what happened to my brother when he passed. I always asked them what it was like, and they said it was beautiful. Imagine the most beautiful place that you can, a beautiful garden.”
Mary has written a book about her experiences of talking to people from the great beyond. She said that her objective is not to make money but to help other people who also lost their loved ones. “I know a lot of people are skeptical and want proof and all that. I can only share what happened to me and hope they can learn from it,” she said.
Over time, Mary began to get interested in who her ancestors were and a few years ago she turned to Ancestry.com for answers. After spending a very long time on the website, Mary finally hit upon a page that linked her to Saint Joseph and the Virgin Mary. Excited, she e-mailed her discovery to the website itself. Unfortunately, they weren’t as enthusiastic about the news as she was. “They said, ‘Well, that’s nice, but you probably made a mistake along the way because that’s easy to do.”
Source: WTAE
