Tom Hanks has played historical figures such as Walt Disney and Mister Rogers throughout his illustrious career, but he’s never been a president — not even the one he’s related to. As if he weren’t already enough of an American icon, the Oscar-winning actor is also a distant relative of Abraham Lincoln. Honest Abe’s mother was named Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and through her, the president and actor are third cousins four times removed. Though Hanks has never depicted his distant relative on film, he did narrate National Geographic’s 2013 docudrama Killing Lincoln, based on the book of the same name.

Everyone’s favorite everyman isn’t the only actor related to a president. Brad Pitt and Barack Obama are ninth cousins, Richard Gere is the sixth cousin four times removed of James Garfield, and Marilyn Monroe and George H.W. Bush were ninth cousins once removed, among others. Most surprising of all: Richard Nixon and James Dean, whose public personas couldn’t be more different, were seventh cousins once removed.

Ulysses S. Grant, America’s 18th president, was born Hiram Ulysses Grant on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio, to Jesse and Hannah Grant. Though Hannah initially wanted to name her son after American diplomat Albert Gallatin, her father suggested the name Hiram and her mother proposed Ulysses. After much discussion, Jesse announced the boy would be named Hiram Ulysses Grant in an effort to please both grandparents. The future president lived the first 17 years of his life with the first name Hiram — until there was a clerical mistake at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Grant was nominated to West Point in 1839 by Ohio Congressman Thomas Hamer, who accidentally wrote Grant’s name in the application as “Ulysses S. Grant.” The confusion stemmed from the fact that Grant often went by Ulysses, rather than Hiram. To further complicate things, the application called for a middle initial, so Hamer added an “S” for Grant’s mother’s surname, Simpson. Grant made several efforts to correct the mistake, but the name stuck. Fellow cadets even referred to Grant as “Uncle Sam” because of his unintentionally patriotic initials. In an 1844 letter to his future wife Julia Dent, Grant wrote, “You know I have an ‘S’ in my name and don’t know what it stand for.”

On March 8 and 16 of 1843, former U.S. president and then-congressman John Quincy Adams trudged to the Washington, D.C., studio of Philip Haas to sit for a portrait of his likeness. Portraiture of wealthy and esteemed individuals was nothing new, but these particular visits involved the novel technology of the daguerreotype, an early form of photography in which the exposure of light on a copper plate coated with silver iodine and treated with a salt solution produced images that proved spellbounding to people of the era.

This wasn’t the first time the venerable congressman had posed for a photo: During a trip to Boston the previous September, he paid a visit to the studio of John Plumbe, though he struggled to stay awake during the hour-and-a-half session. Fortunately, the March 1843 experiences were more fruitful for both the sitter and photographer. Adams’ March 8 diary entry reflects his amazement of the process, which he described as “yet altogether incomprehensible to me…  It would seem as easy to stamp a fixed portrait from the reflection of a mirror; but how wonderful would that reflection itself be, if we were not familiarised to it from childhood.” Returning the following week, Adams interrupted the session of fellow congressman Horace Everett to have his photo taken again. He later gave one of the resulting daguerreotypes to Everett, perhaps as a token of appreciation for allowing him to cut the line; it remained hidden from the public until being unearthed in the 1990s, and today sits in the National Portrait Gallery as the oldest surviving photo of a U.S. president.

It’s worth noting that Adams was not the first president to be photographed; that honor goes to William Henry Harrison, who sat for a daguerreotype shortly after his inauguration in March 1841, although that image has been lost to history. And as the Adams administration had been over for more than a decade by the time the former president posed for Haas, it is also not the oldest photo of a sitting U.S. president. That distinction belongs to James K. Polk, who posed for his piece of history in the White House in 1849.