I admit that I haven’t done detailed research into this. But it seems strange to me that there seem to be far fewer descendants of US presidents than I would expect.
I do a lot of genealogical research into my own family, and for most ancestors that I’ve found in the 1800s, I can often track hundreds or frequently thousands of descendants. I would assume that on average the elected presidents came from wealthy families, which had decent access to the best health care available at the time, and so their birthrate (and the birthrate of their descendants) would be higher than average.
I know that there are no living ancestors of George Washington, James Madison, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln (and others mentionedhere).
Are they outliers? Is the number of presidents too small a set to be statistically significant? Any other reasons?
It may depend on whether you think adopted children and their descendants should count. It seems to me that the thinking has changed over the centuries. Washington legally adopted his wife’s orphaned grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, and GWPC has living descendants. Yet GW is often said to have had no descendants. On the other hand, no one seems to doubt that Michael Reagan is really and truly the child of Ronald Reagan, even though he is adopted.
First, I recall hearing somewhere that Washington was not able to father children - the children he helped raise were those of his wife from a prior marriage. So… no descendants because no swimmers.
Lincoln had four children but only one lived to adulthood (well, OK two if you count 18 as adult, but Tad died at 18 without fathering any children). This was, unfortunately, not an terribly unusual occurrence prior to the 20th Century. Robert Todd had three children, two of which lived long enough to be adult. It seemed to be a pattern with the Lincoln descendants that they didn’t produce a lot of children and thus the line ended in 1985.
Madison may have been sterile, like Washington, or his wife may have been infertile as she had on-going chronic health problems dating from before the time they met.
Jackson is not known to have any biological descendants from his marriage, although both while his wife was alive and after he sure seemed willing to take people in and raise them (including, ironically, Native orphans).
In the case of both Madison and Jackson there may be a bunch of black descendants that have never been acknowledged as both were slave owners and had access to women not allowed to say no to them.
The article says that thirty-five of the forty-four men who have been President have living descendants. That doesn’t sound too unusual. It also notes that the most recent President with no living descendants is McKinley; this probably reflects the fact that child mortality rates were significantly higher prior to the 20th century and that would have made family lines dying out more common.
There’s survivor bias in your comparison of number of descendents of Presidents, with the people who are your own ancestors - those people have at least one descendent (you). People living a couple of hundred years ago would generally today have either zero descendents or lots - rarely just one or two. So your observations from your restricted pool of examples isn’t going to tell you anything much about how likely it is for a random person from any era to have absolutely no descendents today
To the best of my knowledge, Donald Trump has five children and nine grandchildren. Are you suggesting he has other, presumably illegitimate, descendants? I know there’s a rumor that he had a child with a maid who worked for him but no substantial evidence has been offered to support this.
John Tyler, our 10th president, had 15 children from two wives, the last one when he was in his 70s. That son also had two children when he was in his 70s himself who are still alive.
Correction: His 13th child, Lyon, was born when he was 63. He was the father of the two surviving grandsons.
There are apparently rifts within the Jefferson descendants. The white ones balked at recognizing Sally Hemings’s kin. “It’s not because we’re racists, it’s because we’re snobs.”
A couple of Tafts have had very distinguished careers in public service. My brother served in the Navy, Vietnam-era, with a Roosevelt heir.
Julie and David Eisenhower are parents (one daughter, an actress) and grandparents (one granddaughter).
Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg has three children in their 20s, who were raised quite separately from Bobby and Ted’s freakshow grandkids.
that more expensive medical care was better. Not even true now, even less true before doctors started systematically washing their hands between patients.
that birthrate equals survival to adulthood.
that survival to adulthood equals reproduction.
that everybody involved was of normal or high fertility.
My own paternal 1800 ancestor has barely a dozen descendants in my parent’s generation. There were generations when only one or two people got to adulthood, and several of these went into religious life so no descendants of their own.
Move one over, to my paternal grandmother’s family, and that same generation has over one hundred people. Grandma’s family also had people go into religious life, but a similar amount thus a lower ratio. Two families from the same general area, same social class, completely different family sizes thanks to different fertility rates and different survival to adulthood rates.
They’re not the only two-presidents-as-ancestors children. There is another family out there who are descended from two 1800s POTUS’s, and they didn’t know this until they searched their family trees and were in for a VERY big surprise. They knew that there was a president in their genetic woodpile, but not exactly where or who until they did this search. I saw one interviewed on C-SPAN which is how I know this.
