They may appear to be all-American icons. But it seems some of Hollywood's biggest stars owe more than a little to relations who started life on the other side of the Atlantic.

Tom Cruise and Halle Berry are just two of the US celebrities whose families were living in Britain not so very long ago, research has revealed.

It is now possible to discover just how they ended up on U.S shores through the most comprehensive online record of shipping voyages from the British Isles to America, covering more than 100 years.

Popular genealogy website ancestry.co.uk has unearthed the passenger lists from between 1820 and 1960.

During that time more than 100 million people travelled from their home country to the U.S, attracted by the chance to build a new life.

Some were immigrants, some holidaymakers, while others were on business or simply crew members.

Some 9.25 million British emigrants made the long, and often uncomfortable journey, across the Atlantic from British ports to American shores.

Among that number were many ambitious young men and women intent on finding fame and fortune.

And while they might not have found it for themselves, they forged a path for some of the nation's best-known celebrities.

Tom Cruise, for instance, is part Welsh. His full name Tom Cruise Mapother IV reveals a clue, for his paternal great-great grandfather was Dylan Henry Mapother, who emigrated from Flint, in North Wales to Louisville, Kentucky in 1850.

Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry has far more recent British roots.

Her maternal grandmother was just nine months old when she set sail from Liverpool with her mother and five siblings in 1912 on board the Merion.

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