Sarah Caldwell, called the “impresario of Boston opera by the Boston Globe, died the other day. Her death was an occasion for the opera world to remember an inspired, eccentric pioneer, the likes of which pass through life all too infrequently. For some members of my family, it was a chance to brag about a famous relative.

My dad’s cousin called the other night to chat about it. “I suppose you read about Sarah,” he said.

I assumed he was talking about his daughter Sarah, whom I hadn’t seen in about 30 years. He didn’t sound bereaved, so I was confident she wasn’t dead. Perhaps she had achieved something nifty that was widely reported in the press. But he was talking about Sarah Caldwell, our most famous relative and one most of us had never met.

She was a distant cousin of some sort. Her maternal grandmother and my paternal great-grandmother were sisters – or at least that’s how I recall the stretch that it is to call her a cousin being explained. Her parents divorced when Sarah was a young girl, and her mother moved with her to Arkansas, leaving what in those days was no doubt a scandal behind and never looking back.

As a college student, I tried to interview her when she came home to Maryville, Mo., her birthplace, to do a concert with the Kansas City Philharmonic Orchestra. My boss at the college news service thought I was in a great position to do a “family ties” piece. My last name opened no doors – and most likely didn’t even register with her, given that the Dalbeys were just a family her great-aunt had married into. Though I was in awe that someone with some of the same DNA was the first woman ever to conduct the Metropolitan Opera, I was under no illusion that I’d inherited a commitment to women’s equality from here.

Besides, I was secretly relieved. If she’d been the fifth Beatle or someone else whose music was more relevant to me at the time, I could have turned paparazzi before you could say “Na na na na Hey Jude.” But opera? Square, for the times.

This latching onto famous dead shirttail relatives amuses me. We talk about her as if she showed up for a fried chicken dinner every Sunday after church. It’s as if who some of us have been is an all-encompassing characterization for who the rest of us are or will become. Or that having a relative, however distant, as accomplished as Sarah Caldwell was compensates for being only average in our accomplishments.

This fascination with our roots does not extend to most of my immediate family, so we’re something of a disappointment to the rest of them. Our ambivalence surfaced a few years ago when we were asked to pick up a family history where a second cousin hadleft off and write about our branch of the tree. An excruciatingly painful read, it could have been appropriately titled, “A brief history of Dalbey family afflictions.” One cousin, who suffered epileptic seizures, was defined simply by his disease. He might have invented the industrial robot long before George C. Devol Jr. in the 1960s or discovered some breakthrough treatment for a deadly disease, but in our family history, he is remembered simply as someone prone to “fits” who likely led an unhappy life.

The manuscript is stored in a trunk, untouched by an editing pen that would bloody what has been written. Perhaps our branch is destined to be forgotten. Or perhaps, decades from now, some fourth cousin of a great-great-great-niece will claim to have been related to us, or write in a family history that we were odd.