Too long for a comment :

"Famous people from history"/"Famous historical people"

Famous historical figures would probably be the most adequate way of expressing this into proper English.

members of the community were quick enough to give an answer to this off-topic questions

I provided an answer because, much to my stunning surprise, the OP seemed to actually have a point, inasmuch as said fame was of an objective nature.

What seemed rather off to me, personally, was that the man genuinely did not seem to grasp that sharing with others the by now de facto well-researched genealogies of long gone historical personalities (e.g., the family tree of the Habsburg dynasty) is not quite the same as being asked to research the (relatively obscure) genealogy of a contemporary (whose personal files only someone in an official capacity can access, and whose contents might [probably] be considered private, not merely on a human level, but [perhaps] also on a legal basis).

I am writing this to explain my mindset at the time; it would seem that genealogies have been explicitly blacklisted in the mean time; either that, or I'm losing my marbles.

Famous people

My understanding is that the phrase is meant to is to exclude genealogy questions, as opposed to imposing a stringent test for fame as such.

This observation would have been superfluous, were genealogies to have always been explicitly listed as off topic, as they currently are. I can only infer that the change occurred recently, most likely as a direct consequence of this particular question, especially since neither the meta question, nor the actual question's main comment thread, anywhere brought up such an otherwise obvious point as a valid objection.

Factual current political history questions

Political history, and life-history of political persons, are not quite the same notion. While I can see merit in the former even for current events unfolding on the world's geopolitical scene, and in the latter for major personalities of the past, their intersection seems somewhat off, for some reason.