Famous Relatives
1. Benjamin West (1738-1820)
Benjamin West PRA was an Anglo-American painter of historical scenes around and after the time of the American War of Independence and the Seven Years' War. He was the second president of the Royal Academy in London, serving from 1792 to 1805 and 1806 to 1820. He was offered a knighthood by the British Crown, but declined it, believing that he should instead be made a peer. He said that "Art is the representation of human beauty, ideally perfect in design, graceful and noble in attitude."
2. Millard Fillmore (1800-1874)
Millard Fillmore was the 13th President of the United States, the last Whig president, and the last president not to be affiliated with either the Democratic or Republican parties. Fillmore was the only Whig president who did not die in office or get expelled from the party, and Fillmore appointed the only Whig Supreme Court Justice. As Zachary Taylor's vice president, he assumed the presidency after Taylor's death. Fillmore was a lawyer from western New York state, and an early member of the Whig Party. He served in the state legislature, as a U.S. Representative, and as New York State Comptroller. He was elected vice president of the United States in 1848 as Taylor's running mate, and served from 1849 until Taylor's death in 1850, at the height of the "Crisis of 1850" over slavery.
3. Eli Whitney (1765-1825)
Eli Whitney was an American inventor best known for inventing the cotton gin. This was one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution and shaped the economy of the Antebellum South. Whitney's invention made upland short cotton into a profitable crop, which strengthened the economic foundation of slavery in the United States. Despite the social and economic impact of his invention, Whitney lost many profits in legal battles over patent infringement for the cotton gin. Thereafter, he turned his attention into securing contracts with the government in the manufacture of muskets for the newly formed United States Army. He continued making arms and inventing until his death in 1825.
4. Samuel Morse (1791-1872)
Samuel Finley Breese Morse was an American painter and inventor. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs. He was a co-developer of the Morse code, and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy.
5. Annie Oakley (1860-1926)
Annie Oakley was an American sharpshooter and exhibition shooter. Her "amazing talent" first came to light when the then 15-year-old won a shooting match with traveling show marksman Frank E. Butler. The couple joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West show a few years later. Oakley became a renowned international star, performing before royalty and heads of state.
.
6. Walt Disney (1901-1966)
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was an American entrepreneur, animator, voice actor, and film producer. He was a pioneer in the American animation industry, became famous around the world, and is regarded as a national cultural icon.
7. John Wayne (1907-1979)
Marion Mitchell Morrison, better known by his stage name John Wayne and by his nickname "Duke", was an American film actor, director, and producer. An Academy Award-winner for True Grit, Wayne was among the top box office draws for three decades. An enduring American icon, for several generations of Americans he epitomized rugged masculinity and is famous for his demeanor, including his distinctive calm voice, walk, and height.
8. Oliver Winchester (1810-1880)
Oliver Fisher Winchester was an American businessman and politician
9. Barbara Pierce Bush (1926-Present)
Barbara Pierce Bush is the wife of the 41st President of the United States, George H. W. Bush, and served as First Lady of the United States from 1989 to 1993. She is the mother of the 43rd President, George W. Bush and of the 43rd Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush. Previously she had served as Second Lady of the United States from 1981 to 1989.
10. Katherine Hepburn (1907-2003)
Katharine Houghton Hepburn was an American actress. Known for her fierce independence and spirited personality, Hepburn was a leading lady in Hollywood for more than 60 years. She appeared in a range of genres, from screwball comedy to literary drama, and she received four Academy Awards for Best Actress—a record for any performer. In 1999, Hepburn was named by the American Film Institute as the greatest female star of Classic Hollywood Cinema.
11. Philo T. Farnsworth (1906-1971)
Philo Taylor Farnsworth was an American inventor and television pioneer. He made many contributions that were crucial to the early development of all-electronic television. He is perhaps best known for his 1927 invention of the first fully functional all-electronic image pickup device, the "image dissector", as well as the first fully functional and complete all-electronic television system. He was also the first person to demonstrate such a system to the public. Farnsworth developed a television system complete with receiver and camera, which he produced commercially in the form of the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation, from 1938 to 1951, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
12. Edith K. Carow Roosevelt (1861-1948)
Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt was the second wife of President Theodore Roosevelt and served as First Lady of the United States during his presidency from 1901 to 1909.
13. Roger Sherman (1721-1793)
Roger Sherman was an early American lawyer and statesman, as well as a Founding Father of the United States. He served as the first mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, and served on the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence, and was also a representative and senator in the new republic. He was the only person to sign all four great state papers of the U.S.: the Continental Association; the Declaration of Independence; the Articles of Confederation, and; the Constitution.
14. William Ellery (1727-1820)
William Ellery was a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence as a representative of Rhode Island. In 1764, the Baptists consulted with Ellery and the Congregationalist Reverend Ezra Stiles on writing a charter for the college that became Brown University. However, Ellery and Stiles attempted to give control of the college to the Congregationalists, but the Baptists withdrew the petition until it was rewritten to assure Baptist control. Neither Ellery nor Stiles accepted appointment to the reserved Congregationalist seats on the board of trustees.
15. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, known professionally as Waldo Emerson, was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
16. William Howard Taft (1857-1930)
William Howard Taft served as the 27th President of the United States and as the 10th Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, the only person to have held both offices. Taft was elected president in 1908, the chosen successor of Theodore Roosevelt, but was defeated for re-election by Woodrow Wilson in 1912 after Roosevelt split the Republican vote by running as a third-party candidate. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft chief justice, a position in which he served until a few weeks before his death.
17. Miles Standish (1584-1656)
Myles Standish was an English military officer hired by the Pilgrims as military adviser for Plymouth Colony. He accompanied the Pilgrims on their journey on the Mayflower and subsequently Standish played a leading role in the administration and defense of Plymouth Colony from its inception. On February 17, 1621, the Plymouth Colony militia elected him as its first commander and continued to re-elect him to that position for the remainder of his life. Standish served as an agent of Plymouth Colony in England, as assistant governor, and as treasurer of Plymouth Colony. He was also one of the first settlers and founders of the town of Duxbury, Massachusetts.
18. Ida Saxton McKinley (1847-1907)
Ida Saxton McKinley, wife of William McKinley, was First Lady of the United States from 1897 to 1901. Ida was born in Canton, Ohio, the elder daughter of James Saxton, prominent Canton banker, and Katherine DeWalt. Her grandfather, John Saxton, in 1815 founded The Repository, the city's first and now its only newspaper. A graduate of Brook Hall Seminary, a finishing school in Media, Pennsylvania, Ida was refined, charming, and strikingly attractive when she met William "Bill" McKinley at a picnic in 1867. They did not begin courting until after she returned from a Grand Tour of Europe in 1869. While single, she worked for a time as a cashier in her father's bank, a position then usually reserved for men.
19. Mamie Eisenhower (1896-1979)
Mamie Geneva Doud Eisenhower was the wife of United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and First Lady of the United States from 1953 to 1961. Mamie married Dwight Eisenhower at age 19 in 1916. The young couple moved frequently between military quarters in many postings, from Panama to the Philippines. As First Lady, she entertained a wide range of foreign dignitaries, who reacted well to her confident style and splendid costumes.
20. Lou Henry Hoover (1874-1944)
Lou Henry Hoover was the wife of President of the United States Herbert Hoover and served as First Lady from 1929 to 1933. Marrying her geologist and mining engineer husband in 1899, she traveled widely with him, including to Shanghai, China, and became a cultivated scholar and linguist. A proficient Chinese speaker, she is the only First Lady to have spoken an Asian language. She oversaw construction of the presidential retreat at Rapidan Camp in Madison County, Virginia. She was the first First Lady to make regular nationwide radio broadcasts.
21. Grace A. Goodhue Coolidge (1879-1957)
Grace Anna Goodhue Coolidge was the wife of the 30th President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge. She was the First Lady from 1923 to 1929. She graduated from the University of Vermont in 1902 with a bachelor of arts degree in teaching and joined the Clarke Schools for Hearing and Speech in Northampton, Massachusetts to teach deaf children to communicate by lip reading, rather than by signing. She met Calvin Coolidge in 1904, and the two were married the following year.
22. Harriet Lane (1830-1903)
Harriet Rebecca Lane Johnston, acted as First Lady of the United States during the presidency of her uncle, lifelong bachelor James Buchanan, from 1857 to 1861. Lane is among at least thirteen women who have served as First Lady but were not married to the President, with most of the other women being relatives of widowed presidents.
23. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Thomas Stearns Eliot OM, better known by his pen name T. S. Eliot, was an American-born British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and "one of the twentieth century's major poets". He moved to England in 1914 at age 25, settling, working and marrying there. He was eventually naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39, renouncing his American citizenship.
24. Robert Peel (1788-1850)
Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet was a British statesman and member of the Conservative Party, who twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and twice served as Home Secretary. He is regarded as the father of the modern British police and as one of the founders of the modern Conservative Party
25. Edger Lee Masters (1868-1950)
Edgar Lee Masters was an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays, Songs and Satires, The Great Valley, The Serpent in the Wilderness An Obscure Tale, The Spleen, Mark Twain: A Portrait, Lincoln: The Man, and Illinois Poems. In all, Masters published twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman.
26. Richard Lovelace (1617-1658)
Richard Lovelace was an English poet in the seventeenth century. He was a cavalier poet who fought on behalf of the king during the Civil War. His best known works are "To Althea, from Prison," and "To Lucasta, Going to the Warres."
27. Martha W. Skelton Jefferson (1748-1782)
Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, born Martha Wayles was the only wife of her second husband, Thomas Jefferson. She was a widow at her second wedding, as her first husband had died young. When her second husband, Jefferson, was Governor of Virginia, she served as First Lady of Virginia from 1779 to 1781.
28. John Ernest Steinbeck (1902-1968)
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, the multi-generation epic East of Eden, and the novellas Of Mice and Men and The Red Pony. The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. In the first 75 years since it was published, it sold 14 million copies.
29. Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904-1990)
Burrhus Frederic Skinner, commonly known as B. F. Skinner, was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.
30. Robert Lee Frost (1875-1963)
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. One of the most popular and critically respected American poets of the twentieth century, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one of America's rare "public literary figures, almost an artistic institution." He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named Poet laureate of Vermont.
31. Ruth Benedict (1887-1948)
Ruth Fulton Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist. She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College and graduated in 1909. She entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1919, where she studied under Franz Boas. She received her Ph.D and joined the faculty in 1923. Margaret Mead, with whom she may have shared a romantic relationship, and Marvin Opler, were among her students and colleagues.
32. O. Henry (1862-1888)
William Sydney Porter, known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American short story writer. O. Henry's short stories are known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization, and surprise endings.
33. Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974 when he became the only U.S. president to resign the office. Nixon had previously served as a U.S. Representative and Senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961.
34. Will Geer (1902-1978)
William Aughe Ghere, known as Will Geer, was an American actor and social activist, known for his portrayal of Grandpa Zebulon Tyler Walton in the 1970s TV series The Waltons.
