Eight of Hollywood's biggest celebs are delving into their family history to find out where they came from on TLC's Who Do You Think You Are?

Originally broadcast on NBC, Who Do You Think You Are? has been given new life by TLC with eight new episodes. Each hour, a different celebrity takes a globe-spanning journey to uncover mysteries about his or her ancestry.

Kicking off the series on July 23 is Kelly Clarkson, followed by Christina Applegate (July 30), Chelsea Handler (Aug. 6) and then Zooey Deschanel (Aug. 13). Additional participants include Chris O'Donnell, Jim Parsons, Cindy Crawford and Trisha Yearwood.

TRACING family trees is a popular British pastime. Television programmes show celebrities rummaging through old census documents. Websites help amateur sleuths track down distant relatives. A new project launched on August 26th provides another twist to the obsession.

“Kindred Britain” is a website launched by Nicholas Jenkins, an English professor at Stanford University in California. The project grew out of Professor Jenkins’s research into both his own background and that of W.H. Auden, a 20th-century poet. The website now holds entries on nearly 30,000 Britons. Visitors to the website trace relations between different people using clear infographics and interactive tools. Admirals, bankers, poets, painters, lawyers and politicians are all in the mix. Unlike traditional family trees, these include bigamists, same-sex couples and illegitimate children.

The project is an intriguing example of the “digital humanities”. Scholars are starting to interact with coders and website designers to make their research more accessible and data publicly available.

Certain affinities appear in the data. Poets are often related to each other whereas novelists tend to be linked by marriage. T.S. Eliot, a 20th-century American-born poet, is a distant cousin of the British bards Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley (a link presumably unknown to Eliot). In contrast links between Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, perhaps the two most famous 19th-century novelists, are through several generations of marriages. As characters in novels are more meritocratic, so too are novelists.

Other connections are more unexpected. Gwyneth Paltrow (pictured), an American actress, is linked by marriage to A.C. Swinburne, a Victorian poet who dabbled in sadomasochistic verses. David Cameron, the prime minister, is distantly connected to Harold Pinter, a dramatist who once said that voting for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 was “the most shameful act of my life”. Kevin Bacon, a famously well-connected American actor, is related to the 16th-century philosopher Francis Bacon.

And yet despite its novelty, “Kindred Britain” touches on an older notion. Even within the sprawl of data, a handful of families are shown to have shaped British culture and history. The number of prime ministers related to each other may not be surprising. But the links between different walks of life are illuminating, for both literary critics and celebrity-spotters alike.

I use the Ancestry program Family Tree to fill in the blanks in my ancestry. It a great tool. I strongly recommend it. My son is also interested in our family history. We share any information we gather. Our family tree is part of the huge data base the Mormon church maintains, so everything we find out is available to others, which is fine.

It is great to be able to trace your roots. It helps make you feel grounded. I feel bad for folks like my sisters who were both adopted and have had no access to their biological family history because the records were sealed. One of my sisters has tried very hard to locate her mother. At this point, her mom has probably passed. It is sad because my sister has a lot of health problems. Knowing the health history of her parentage could be very helpful. My other sister seemed disinterested in finding our about her biological family. She's passed on now, never knowing anything about her family.

There is just something about it... Maybe it's just that I don't care where people came from, what matters is where they are going as individuals.

Must just be me. A lot of people seem to enjoy it.

Where someone is going is clearly more important than where they came from. My family tree is historically rich. It is interesting to discover both the good and the bad about our ancestors. Many people don't seem to have roots, especially not in a time when divorce and blended families prevail. My sisters were adopted. They had no idea the makeup of their biological and intellectual histories. The surviving sister has never stopped trying to find her birth mother.

At a Democratic candidates forum in November 2015, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, raised the most urgent question in American politics: Is he really Larry David?

The answer, most likely, is no. But the former presidential candidate and the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" star are apparently distantly related.

Sanders is a "third cousin or something," David told reporters at a Television Critics Association event on Wednesday. The comedian, who impersonated the senator on "Saturday Night Live" during the 2016 election, said he learned about the genealogical connection while filming an upcoming episode of the PBS series "Finding Your Roots."

"I was very happy about that," David said, according to Variety. "I thought there must have been some connection."

David, who scored an Emmy nomination for the spot-on impression of his fellow Brooklyn native on "SNL," explained how he came to play the part.

"This Bernie Sanders thing," David told reporters, according to Variety. "During the first debate between Bernie and Hillary, ["SNL" creator] Lorne Michaels got emails and calls during the debate, saying that I should be doing Bernie Sanders."

That's when Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel, the inspiration for Jeremy Piven's character on "Entourage," stepped in to help close the deal.

"Ari Emanuel called me up and said, 'What did you think?'' And every time I watched Bernie Sanders, I would repeat everything that he said, because I know that I can talk like that. So I started talking to Ari, the agent, I started talking to him like Bernie."

The rest is television history.

Sanders even appeared with David in a February 2016 sketch. The "Seinfeld" creator played an aristocratic gentleman on a sinking ship who debates the merits of democratic socialism with the senator's rumpled commoner."Curb Your Enthusiasm," David's semi-autobiographical sitcom, returns to HBO in October.

Sanders did not immediately respond to news reports about his expanded family tree.