Mild curiosity, and I have no idea how to identify the answer, but it would be interesting to know who is descended from the most Presidents – i.e., someone who is the offspring of a union between a man descended from one president and a woman descended from another – and if JQA or Benjamin Harrison were the presidents in question, that would add in JA and WHH. If a family union of this nature resulted in a child who married a person descended from a third line (or, hypothetically, a third and fourth line)…
Trivia question: What President-to-be had a White House wedding, before running for the Presidency?
Wouldn’t the offspring of Julie Nixon Eisenhower count, the daughter of a president marrying the grandson of another president (Especially as her father was the VP for her husband’s grandfather!)
According to the site sited above, Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower have three children: Jennie, Alex and Melanie. Their maternal grandfather was Nixon and paternal great-grandfather was Eisenhower. I think those are the only children with Presidents in both their maternal and paternal ancestors.
I don’t know who Rick Taft is, bou’re missing at least two Tafts – Robert Alphonso Taft II (current governor of Ohio) and William Howard Taft IV (senior counsel to the U.S. Department of State).
There’s also a living Theodore Roosevelt (V, I think) who is a historian and author.
On the subject of George & Martha, has mentioned Martha had two surviving children from her first marriage and, though they never went by the name of Washington, George did adopt them and they called him father. Both died young (the daughter from an epileptic seizure and the son [along with his wife] from a carriage accident during the Revolution; the son left two very small orphaned children and Washington raised these practically from the cradle for the last two decades of his life). He did not bequeathe them Mt. Vernon (which he left to his nephew Bushrod) but this was not a slight- their grandmother was an extremely wealthy woman in her own right and he knew they would inherit her estate. (It also may have been an irritation at her: Washington loathed slavery and saw it as something that needed to be ended for America to progress and to that end he freed and pensioned his own slaves in his will; he called upon Martha to free hers as well [she inherited slaves from her father* and from her first husband and they and their descendants were distinct from {though of course intermarried with} George’s**). She refused (possibly in part due to the fact that they were such a huge part of her estate), which there is no record of it miffing George but I’m sure it did.
In any case, there are many descendants of Martha around. Her great-granddaughter married Robert E. Lee, thus all of his descendants are also Washington descendants, while another line intermarried with Jefferson’s descendants. (The mansion at Arlington was built with materials from Mt. Vernon and there were slaves who served Lee’s wife who could remember the Washingtons.)
McKinley’s daughters both died in infancy, so there are no descendants there. (He was one of the presidents most devoted to his wife, who suffered from what we would probably now call Tourette’s Syndrome.)
Benjamin Harrison’s youngest daughter caused some substantial discord in the family as she was 1) born when he was 64, thus messing up some of the inheritance plans of her older half-siblings 2) the first cousin as well as half-sister of his older children, Harrison having married his first wife’s niece shortly after her death. Other old presidents (not counting the illegitimate issue) include John Tyler (his youngest was born when he was 70) and Grover Cleveland (who sired when he was 67).
*According to some biographers (and I’m not talking Kitty Kelly but legitimate historians), one of her slaves was also her half-sister (not unlike Thomas Jefferson’s wife’s inheritance of her half-sister Sally Hemings). Said half-sister later became the concubine of Martha’s son (her own nephew) Jack and bore him children.
**In cases such as this, ownership of children was determined by who owned the mother.
While they’ve managed to maintain themselves in obscurity - and have never talked publically about their father - both June Lee and Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald appear to be still alive and may themselves have children.
Also, John Wilkes Booth may have had a daughter, Ogarita. Ogarita Booth claimed to be his daughter from a questionable marriage to a woman named Izola Martha Mills. Ogarita’s daughter, an actress named Izola Forrester, wrote a 1937 bestseller entitled This One Mad Act claiming not only that she was Booth’s granddaughter but that he was not the man killed in the barn (long a popular theory among conspiracy buffs) but lived for many more years and kept contact with his daughter and his famous brother. DNA testing would tell for sure but it’s not likely to come. (A mummy purported to be the elderly non-barn-killed Booth’s was earning $100,000 per year for its owners during the Depression; a man who died in Oklahoma in the 1890s claimed to be Booth and even had some vivid details of the barn incident, but bizarrely it appears this man may have been Booth’s killer, Boston Corbett, a wildly psychotic Andersonville survivor who even before the war had castrated himself to cure an addiction to prostitutes, disobeyed a direct order not to shoot Booth due to an “order from God” and could very believably have convinced himself he was Booth.
What I wanted to link to was the book This One Mad Act, but it’s long out of print. Since the memory of it is kept alive mainly by conspiracy nuts, it’s hard to find a routine site that details it. However, having read the book itself many years ago her story is plausible but of course completely unproven. (There are many oddities about the official story of the death of Booth, but personally I think they actually did get the right man, just as I think Boston Corbett was the man who died thinking he was Booth, but otoh Booth was a notorious horndog and general weirdo so it would not be surprising if he did leave some descendants or even if he had a secret marriage.)
To further on what bonzer posted, June and Audrey (who goes by Rachael) Oswald, along with their mother Marina, took the last name of Marina’s second husband, (Kenneth) Porter. June is now married and a businesswoman in an undisclosed location, using her husband’s last name. Rachael is also married, using her husband’s last name, and is an R.N. somewhere in Texas. Both try desperately to maintain a disconnection between themselves and their father, for obvious reasons. They reportedly do not agree with their mother, who currently asserts a belief that Oswald was involved in the assassination (as an agent of the U.S. government or elements therein) but not personally guilty of murdering President Kennedy. No word on whether either has children.
If one of the Bush twins were to marry one of the Eisenhowers, THAT would be Republican Royalty- their children would be descendants of four 20th/21st century Republican presidents. The other twin could marry a descendant of John Quincy Adams, which would also assure their children of four presidential ancestors.
Trivia about the Eisenhower-Nixon marriage: David Eisenhower’s best man was his best friend Fred Grandy (bka as “Gopher” from The Love Boat and later a Republican Congressman from Iowa). Oddly, Grandy also appeared in a movie about the Lincoln conspiracy based on a book which made substantial use of Izola Forrester’s text.
Andrew Jackson is listed here as childless, but in fact he had an adopted son, Andrew Jackson Jr. (biologically the nephew of Rachel Jackson) who has many descendants. He also reared several other children (including a Creek Indian child, Lincoier), but Jr. was the only one he officially adopted. (How they got him is an odd story: Rachel’s brother had more children than he could handle and, when his wife gave birth to twins, they invited the wealthy but childless Jacksons to come take their pick.)
quite a while ago life magazine did a photo article on decendants of the major players of the civil war. it was done before the death of the last lincoln.
they had decendants of:
davis vs lincoln
lee vs grant
sherman and i forget who
the southern side did a lot better than the union side as far as being fruitful and multiplying.