Theodore Roosevelt and Me

NOTE: Some of you may have noticed that I did not publish an essay on Thursday and Friday of last week — although the clamor was muted. Things got a little busy. I partially wrote both essays and when I finish them in the next few days they’ll appear as “bonus” essays.

Before I get into the details of my connection to President Theodore Roosevelt, I need to talk a little about the Roosevelt family.  I’ll be looking at this family again in a few weeks, when I focus on Theodore Roosevelt’s distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who married Teddy Roosevelt’s niece Eleanor (daughter of Teddy’s brother Eliot Roosevelt).

I found a detailed Roosevelt family tree online; it’s too detailed to see clearly in this essay, but here’s a link so you can look at it for yourself.  

The Roosevelts are connected to many significant names in American history:  Martin Van Buren, Robert Livingston, John Jacob Astor, Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge, the Van Rennsselaer family, the duPont family, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’m not going to make any effort to explore these connections, but I think it’s useful to recognize that this family has lots of interesting connections.

I need to make one additional comment, this time about how Theodore Roosevelt became president.  He was elected to serve as Vice President when William McKinley won reelection in 1900; on September 6, 1901 – only six months after he and McKinley were inaugurated – McKinley was shot and killed.  Roosevelt rose to the Presidency, was reelected in 1904, and chose not to run again in 1908.

Having said all of this – my most direct connection to President Theodore Roosevelt is through his wife, Alice Lee.  I didn’t know very much about her – and I’ll be able to talk more about the Roosevelts in a couple of weeks – so it’s interesting to see what Alice’s family is all about. 

You can’t be an American historian or a genealogy with roots in colonial Virginia without the surname “Lee” making your ears prick up.  My first question was whether Alice Lee (#16) was connected to the famous Lee family of Virginia.  I figured that it would be difficult to verify this connection because the Smith surname is in the middle of the connection- #11, 12, and 13.

I recognized the names in this line going back to my 7^th great-grandfather Joseph Ripley (#9).  He is pretty well documented on my tree.  His sister Rebecca (#10) married Gershom Smith in Massachusetts in 1694, and they had a son named Jonathan (#11).   With a little noodling around, I was able to make the connection to Alice Lee and then to President Roosevelt.

Two things about Alice before we leave this (successful) connection:

•  Alice died two days after giving birth to her first child, also named Alice, at the age of 22.  This happened on February 14, 1884 – only 11 hours after Teddy’s mother died of typhoid fever in the same house where Alice died.  Although he remarried just a couple of years after Alice’s death, Teddy reportedly grieved the loss of his wife for the rest of his life, hardly ever speaking her name and omitting her from his autobiography.

• Alice’s “Lee” ancestors were from Massachusetts all the way back to the 1630s, when the first Lee came to Massachusetts.  If this family is connection with the Lee family of Virginia, the connection is in England, before anyone went anywhere.

I’m not going to spend much time on the Geni connection.  With a quick glance, I can see that this link contains an error I’ve encountered before (specifically, in the essays I wrote about Rutherford B. Hayes, Grover Cleveland, and William McKinley).  In the middle of the second line, you see Hannah Burgess identified as the mother of Hannah Workman.  I have never been able to prove this connection, and it links the Workman family (solidly of western Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky) with the Burgess family of Massachusetts.  I don’t have any evidence that this connection is accurate and I think that geography makes it unlikely.