Millard Fillmore and Me

I thought this might help us remember who Millard Fillmore was

According to this chart, Millard Fillmore is my 3^rd cousin 6x removed.

I was able to verify this connection pretty easily:

Numbers 0-9 on this chart were already on my Ancestry tree.  I have worked with this line a number of times and it’s pretty rock solid.

Before I move on to the Millard Fillmore portion of this line, let me tell you why I like this lineage:

1. It goes back through my Arnold family, which is the shortest of my ancestral lines.  My immigrant ancestor on this line, Eli Arnold, came to America in the last half of the 18^th century and was a fairly ephemeral character.  I haven’t been able to find out very much about him

2. The father of Miles Arnold (#4) was Spencer Arnold, Eli’s son.  Spencer’s wife Martha Pease provides me with a connection that goes all the way back to Martha’s Vineyard in the 1630s, when two Pease brothers emigrated as part of the Puritan Great Migration.  This was the first family that I had traced back this far when I started doing serious genealogy research a decade ago, and I’m always happy when I get to revisit them.  They feel like old friends.

3. The movement of Cousin Millard’s ancestors from Bristol, Massachusetts, to Dutchess County, NY (between Manhattan and Albany) mirrors a pattern I saw in my own family line.  My ancestors who migrated in this pattern were Quakers, although I don’t see any evidence that Cousin Millard’s family followed this faith. 

I had to build the connection to Millard Fillmore – I had Ester Ripley (#10, Joseph’s sister) in my tree, but I didn’t have any information about her.  In fact, my tree said she died in infancy.  I had to work a bit with the hints WikiTree provided, but I was able to confirm all of the connections.  I was particularly happy when I got closer to Millard Fillmore on this line – I began to get hints like this.

This connection is pretty rock-solid. 

I also like this because it gives me the opportunity to reflect on Millard Fillmore – certainly a sentence most people, including me, have neither thought nor uttered in our lives.  The White House website itself doesn’t have much good to say about old Cousin Millard:

In his rise from a log cabin to wealth and the White House, Millard Fillmore demonstrated that through methodical industry and some competence an uninspiring man could make the American dream come true.

Despite this fairly rude comment, Cousin Millard holds an interesting spot in United States history.

1. He is the second president to have come into office upon the death of a president.  John Tyler assumed the office in 1841 (after the death of William Henry Harrison) and cousin Millard assumed the office in 1850 (after the death of Zachary Taylor). Neither Tyler nor Fillmore was able to win the office in his own right in the next election

2. As Vice President, he presided over the Senate during the months of debate over the Compromise of 1850,

3. He was the last of four Presidents from the Whig party to serve as President, following Harrison, Tyler, and Taylor.  This makes him the last president not to be affiliated with either the Democratic or Republican Parties. 

4. When the Whig party disintegrated in the 1850s (much like today’s GOP), Fillmore chose not to affiliate with the new Republican Party, instead accepting the 1856 nomination for President of the Know Nothing (or American) Party.  This was a fiercely anti-immigrant party that flared briefly during the 1850s.   Their name stems from the fact that members of this originally clandestine group were required to answer “I know nothing” when asked about the specifics of the movement. 

Interestingly (well, I think it’s interesting), Geni also takes me back to the Wibourne-Eddy-Millard-Fillmore connection, but through my mother’s side of the family.

In this connection, I am good back to the second Thomas Jenkins (on the right side of the second line on this chart.  However, I don’t show Hannad (or Hanna) Jenkins as his mother.  Instead, I have his mother identified as Lettice Hanford, which Geni shows as his wife.  This is just incorrect, so this connection breaks down.

This makes me a little sad.  The Hunt family in my mother’s ancestry connects me to the Mormon Church in the 1840s; Jefferson Hunt, the brother of Elizabeth “Betsy” Hunt, was with the Mormons in Nauvoo and was a leader of the group that migrated to Salt Lake City.  It’s fun to be able to talk about these ancestors.  This will have to wait – I’ll have several chances later on in this series.  Preliminary information suggests that I connect to nine presidents through my Hunt line – Buchanan, Lincoln, Cleveland, McKinley, Taft, Nixon, Bush, Clinton, and Gore (I included him because he won in 2000 — although we didn’t storm the capitol building and threaten to hang him unless he did the “right thing” by confirming himself rather than Bush as the winner).