What Is Wynonna Earp's Actual Relationship To Wyatt Earp?
There's some confusion that needs to be cleared up. Consider Wynonna Earp and its eponymous heroine. She is the descendant of Wyatt Earp, the rootinest, tootinest, shootinest lawman ever immortalized on the silver screen. But just how far up the family tree is Wynonna's branch?
As Reddit users have pointed out, there are varying answers to that question, with SYFY's website referring to the show's hero as Wyatt's great-granddaughter, while her Wiki page calls her his great-great-granddaughter. If we want definitive answers, it seems that there is only one reasonable means of getting them. Let's make like so many bored empty-nesters trying to fill in the hours once dedicated to raising kids and get really, really into genealogy.
We begin with Wyatt himself who, within the show's continuity, had a son at some point. We don't get many details outside of a name: Josiah Earp, described by Two-Face Jack as "the courageous one." After Wyatt's death in 1929, Josiah became the heir to the Earp curse. Josiah had a son of his own, Edwin Earp, the one-year wonder who helped found the Black Badge Division and who made it all of 11 months as the heir before being killed. His tenure: 1967-1968.
The long road from Wyatt to Wynonna
Edwin begat Ward, born 1966, who would grow up to be Wynonna's loving father. That places Wynonna herself at four generations removed from Wyatt — his great-great-granddaughter. It's hard to say if the extra "great" makes it more or less weird when she winds up having a kid with Wyatt's old best friend, Doc Holliday, but we're not here to throw stones.
Of course, in reality Wyatt Earp didn't have any children, which was no small feat for a man who was arrested three times in one year for "keeping and being found in a house of ill-fame." He did come close. His first wife, Urilla, is believed to have died during childbirth, along with the couple's baby. Earp would go on to have three wives, common-law or otherwise, while a fourth woman named Sally Heckell told authorities that she was married to him during one of those ill-fame house raids. Despite all of this, the famed frontier lawman made it 80 full years without ever once producing a bouncing baby gunfighter.
Then again, in reality Wyatt Earp didn't look very much like Kurt Russell and probably wasn't cursed by vengeful and supernatural forces, either. This, coupled with the preponderance of Sharknadoes, is what makes SYFY's television lineup so eminently preferable to real life.