Earlier today, I stumbled across this Quora answer by Eric Wang about a teenaged parkourist named Joseph Marx who lives in London and claims that he is the great-great-grandson of Karl Marx. The story was so bizarre and yet so awesome that I started looking around on the internet to see if I could find out more. I uncovered at least half a dozen articles online talking about it.
Despite how intriguing I found this story, I very quickly became skeptical of it because I noticed that some of the details didn’t seem to fit. I have always had an interest in reading about living descendants of famous historical figures and I had a bit of time on my hands, so I decided to investigate this claim.
I can’t prove for certain that this Joseph Marx is not a descendant of Karl Marx, but, having now charted all Karl Marx’s known descendants, I’m 90% convinced that Joseph Marx is just some guy who happened to have the same last name and incorrectly assumed that Marx was his great-great-grandfather without any solid evidence.
Continue reading “Is Karl Marx’s Great-Great-Grandson Really Doing Parkour in London?”