legacy Tag

22 Mar

Posted at 13:58h in Newsletter

GENEALOGY- DID GRANDPA INVENT THE POTATO CHIP? In a couple of recent editions, we covered the legends surrounding Tom Smith. His father, John Addison Smith IV, had his own amazing stories that I discovered while working on their genealogy. According to legend, Addison was a dreamer, a gambler, and an inventor. It was said that Addison went “through three fortunes in his lifetime”. He claimed one of his inventions was the “potato chip.” I researched the history of the potato chip, and references to it began to appear in cookbooks from 1817 to 1832. Since Addison was not born in 1841, the story...

12 Mar

Posted at 12:54h in Newsletter

ANCESTORS- YOUR 3X GREAT UNCLE DIES, AND HE'S REPLACED BY A LINCOLN CONSPIRATOR Suppose you were planning to visit Dry Tortugas National Park and were interested in whether you would come across headstones, gravestones, markers, or cenotaphs. In that case, this is the response you would get from AI: The only identified gravestone at Dry Tortugas National Monument belongs to a man named John Greer, a laborer who died at Fort Jefferson on November 5, 1861, and whose headstone was discovered underwater by archaeologists. However, AI has not visited the Dry Tortugas, as we came across one of our client’s third Great-Uncles,...

22 Feb

Posted at 17:01h in Newsletter

ANCESTRY- THE SOCIETY OF PRESIDENTIAL DESCENDANTS GATHER AGAIN A year ago, we attended a panel of the Society of Presidential Descendants on President’s Day weekend at the Truman Little White House- 2024 Society of Presidential Descendants We enjoyed it enough to go again this year. In addition to the descendants of Truman, Eisenhower, Carter, and Cleveland, we also had a descendant of Grant and Teddy Roosevelt in attendance this year. Here are some of the tidbits from the panel: Ulysses Grant Dietz told us of the irony in that General Grant, who became the Union Army soldier most responsible for ending the scourge of...

08 Feb

Posted at 14:52h in Newsletter

GENEALOGIST- THE ANABAPTIST PRESIDENTS In our last edition, we discussed Anabaptist beliefs and our visit to the Behalt Anabaptists Now, we will visit which presidents were raised as Anabaptists and how their early spiritual lives may have influenced them. There were three presidents all Republican from Hoover through Nixon, and their terms were only interrupted by Democrats FDR, Truman, and Kennedy. The picture to the right shows Eisenhower, Nixon (foreground), and Hoover behind them. The 1953 picture of Eisenhower's inauguration at the bottom shows Hoover behind the Chief Justice and VP Nixon to the right of Eisenhower. The three of them, including Truman,...

29 Jan

Posted at 12:29h in Newsletter

GENEALOGY- WITH THE SUPER BOWL COMING, WE WONDERED WHICH PRESIDENTS HAD PLAYED FOOTBALL? Dwight D. Eisenhower (Army): Before he went on to his military career and then the Presidency, Ike served as both a running back and linebacker in the Army, starting on both sides of the ball. Dwight Eisenhower said, “Not making the baseball team at West Point was one of the greatest disappointments of my life, maybe my greatest.” However, that disappointment led him to make the West Point football team (pictured below left), where he was a varsity starter as both running back and linebacker and tackled the...

11 Jan

Posted at 13:25h in Newsletter

ANCESTOR- “IT’S LIKE MAKING YOUR EX D.J. YOUR WEDDING,” JIMMY KIMMEL SAID OF KAMALA HARRIS PRESIDING OVER THE CERTIFICATION OF TRUMP’S WIN” There had to be some awkwardness at Carter's funeral with the seating arrangements (above). However, as Kimmel pointed out, lots of attention was given to the awkwardness of Vice President (VP) and former presidential candidate Harris's role as VP in certifying the election results, where she formalized her loss. How many times has this happened in the past? Seven times, the first time was perhaps the oddest: VP John C. Breckenridge, whom we wrote about in November (pictured) , and was the...

30 Dec

Posted at 13:36h in Newsletter

ANCESTRY- MORE OF HENRY CLAY'S EXTENDED FAMILY William Campbell Preston Breckinridge (1837 – 1904) was a prominent lawyer and Democratic politician from Kentucky. He served as a U.S. Representative from 1885 to 1895. He was part of the esteemed Breckinridge political family, the grandson of Senator John Breckinridge and a first cousin of Vice President and presidential candidate John C. Breckinridge. Breckinridge graduated from Centre College in 1855 and earned his Juris Doctor from the University of Louisville in 1857. He practiced law in Lexington, Kentucky, where he married Lucretia Clay, Henry Clay's granddaughter. William joined the Confederate States Army in 1861 despite...

14 Dec

Posted at 13:04h in Newsletter

GENEALOGIST- ONE KILLING LEADS TO ANOTHER 20 YEARS LATER We’ve all seen various lithographic recreations of Lincoln’s assassination. We know the stories related to the fates of the President, the First Lady, and John Wilkes Booth. What about the other two people in the image? Future Brevet Colonel Henry Rathbone (1837-1911) and his fiancé Clara Harris had known each other for 15 years. Henry’s widowed mother had married Clara’s widowed father, so they were stepsiblings who met at ages 11 and 14 and became close friends. Both families were prominent, with Henry's father in 1845 leaving him $6.3 m in today’s dollars....

01 Dec

Posted at 12:59h in Newsletter

GENEALOGY- BRAVE ABOLITIONISTS CARRIED THE MORAL ARGUMENT FORWARD AGAINST SLAVERY. WHAT ABOUT THE ECONOMIC DILEMMA? When Britain abolished slavery in 1833 through the Slavery Abolition Act, it essentially "bought the freedom" of enslaved people by paying a large sum of compensation, amounting to £20 million, directly to the slaveholders. This represented 40% of the government's annual budget, equivalent to roughly 5% of the British GDP. The argument is made that parliament did not do this to reward the slaveholders but to reduce their incentive to oppress the freed people post-slavery through other methods because the enslavers would not feel economically hurt. Whether...

17 Nov

Posted at 14:32h in Newsletter

IN CASE SOUTH DAKOTA NEEDS MORE MONUMENT HERITAGE I wrote an article in 2023 called Dejavu at the Ballot Box . Dejavu election that showed the number of times we had the same choice for president on the same ballot. Of course, with President Biden dropping out, that did not happen. We did, however, for the second time, have a president elected to a non-sequential second term. Of course, we have seen many mentions of Trump doing a Grover Cleveland. Think of Grover in his grave, wondering why it took so long for him to become a verb. By the way, Grover Cleveland...

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