What’s it like to be related to someone who altered history?
Let's find out as we do a bit of genealogy and look at the descendants of some famous
historical figures and discover how they feel about their renowned relatives.
Davy Crockett was much more than some guy who died at the Alamo.
He was also a scout and soldier who fought in the War of 1812, and he was once a congressman
from Tennessee in the House of Representatives.
After he lost his seat in the House, he joined the Texas Revolution, but he was famously
killed at the Alamo when the fort was besieged by Mexican soldiers in 1836, although some
accounts say that he was taken prisoner and executed.
Either way, Crockett has been revered by Americans as a great frontiersman, though his descendants
hate it when you call him "Davy."
The modern-day Crocketts blame the 1950s Disney movies and TV show for popularizing that nickname,
as they claim that he never actually called himself that in real life.
They also blame the shows and movies for plopping a coonskin cap on his head, although eyewitness
accounts say the man actually did wear one.
Either way, at family reunions, Crockett's descendants, including his great-great-great-great-granddaughter
Joy Bland, respectfully ask attendees to leave the caps at home and refer to their ancestor
as "David," Other descendants have followed in Crockett's military footsteps, including
Master Sergeant David Crockett, who serves in the U.S. Air National Guard.
In 1859, British naturalist Charles Darwin surprised the world when he announced his
theory of evolution and that humans and animals had ancestral connections.
Victorians were shocked as they avidly read his On the Origin of Species, while scientists
pondered over his ideas.
The Father of Evolution fathered ten children by his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood.
Their oldest child, William Erasmus Darwin, was studied extensively by his father, who
eventually published his findings in the journal Mind.
But even Charles Darwin surely realized that impregnating his cousin wasn't necessarily
good for the gene pool, as three of his children died before the age of 11.
One wonders what Darwin would think if he knew that today, his great-great-great granddaughter,
Laura Keynes, is a Catholic apologist.
Keynes told the National Catholic Register in 2013 that like her grandfather, she was
agnostic for a while, though she eventually returned to her roots in the Catholic faith.
As she worked on her doctorate in philosophy, she realized that she couldn't dismiss a compelling
intellectual case for faith.
Meanwhile, Darwin's great-great grandson, Chris Darwin, spends his days working as a
tour guide in the Blue Mountains of Australia, and ironically enough, he supports teaching
creationism to children.
"After I failed a biology exam, oops, my friends told me I must be devolving back into the
primordial swamp."
Albert Einstein was only five years old when he was awestruck by a compass and what made
the needle move.
And when he was 11, he became infatuated with a book of geometry.
These two common household items eventually inspired him to ultimately develop the theory
of relativity, and he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921.
But what about Albert Einstein as a family man?
He married several times, and his first child was a girl who was born out of wedlock and
quietly given up for adoption.
He later had two other children.
There was his son Eduard, who eventually developed schizophrenia.
Then there was Hans Albert, who became a renowned scientist.
Of Hans' children, only one, Bernhard Caesar, lived to adulthood, and he ended up having
five kids of his own.
The lives of Einstein's great-grandchildren are quite diverse.
One of them, Dr. Thomas Einstein, attended medical school and now specializes in anesthesiology
in Los Angeles.
Paul Einstein is a classical violinist who lives in southern France.
Ted Einstein runs a furniture store in Los Angeles, while Mira Einstein Yehieli lives
in Israel with her family.
Charles Einstein lives in Switzerland where he operated his own computer game store before
working as a spokesman for a hospital.
Ernest Hemingway published his first article for a Kansas City newspaper when he was just
17 years old.
Ten years later, after being wounded during World War I, he published his first of many
novels, The Sun Also Rises.
And 28 years after that, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In between, he married four times, had a few mistresses, and fathered three sons.
But the prolific writer was deeply troubled, battling depression and eventually ending
his own life in 1961.
Sadly, he wasn't the only one.
A total of seven Hemingway family members have ended their own lives, and each tragedy
has led some to talk about the so-called "Hemingway Curse."
For example, Hemingway's granddaughter Margaux battled substance abuse and took her own life
in 1996.
Fortunately, the same fate didn't befall her sisters.
Actress Joan Hemingway also battled addiction and depression and became an artist after
retiring from film.
Then there's Mariel Hemingway, also an actress, who even co-starred with Margaux in the 1976
film Lipstick.
According to Mariel, the Hemingway Curse is really mental illness, and she's doing her
best to shine a light on the family's struggles.
In 2013, she was the center of a documentary called Running from Crazy, which tackled some
not-so-secret issues of the Hemingway clan, such as alcoholism and abuse.
"I think with darkness there is light.
And so, that darkness is that mental illness, that mental instability, that insecurity."
Can an outlaw really be a family man?
Apparently, he can.
As it turns out, Jesse James was happy to marry his first cousin, Zerelda Mimms, who
was named after his own mother.
From this union came two children, Jesse Jr. and Mary.
Sadly, both kids were at home when their father was shot to death by Robert Ford in April
1882.
Jesse Jr. remembered that the family had just finished breakfast when he heard a shot fire
in the front room.
The seven-year-old ran in to see his father dead on the floor.
In 1899, Jesse Jr. wrote Jesse James, My Father in defense of his dad while trying to make
a little money to support his mother.
However, not everyone in this family is happy to be descended from the famous outlaw.
Mary James' husband, Henry Barr, always resented his wife's legacy.
It's an attitude that trickled down through subsequent generations.
Genealogist Joan Malley-Beamis was stonewalled when she wrote to Mary and Henry's son Lawrence
Barr about the family.
Lawrence's wife, Thelma, was kind enough to write Beamis and explain that Lawrence didn't
know much about his ancestor because Mary forbade discussions on the matter.
And when publisher Eric F. James wrote to Jesse James' great-granddaughter, Elizabeth
Barr, for more information, he received a terse response through Barr's friend that
said,
"Tell Eric James to mind his own business."
The official White House website pays tribute to past presidents, including Thomas Jefferson,
who served as the nation's third president from 1801 to 1809.
But the website fails to mention the secret Jefferson took to his grave when he died in
1826.
He not only had six children by his wife Martha, but also six other children by Sally Hemings,
a black woman he enslaved.
As early as 1802, Richmond journalist James T. Callender, whose story was told in an episode
of Drunk History, accused Jefferson of fathering children by Hemings.
Jefferson's affair with Hemings began years after his wife died.
Interestingly enough, Hemings first worked as a free woman at Jefferson's Paris home.
When she became pregnant by him, she made a most extraordinary request.
She asked to return to enslavement at Monticello, his Virginia plantation, in exchange for,
quote "extraordinary privileges," as well as freedom for her future children.
Jefferson agreed and eventually released Hemings' four surviving children.
For generations, Hemings' descendants fought to be recognized as Jefferson's relatives,
and they were finally heard.
At an exhibit on Hemings that opened in 2018, a number of descendants attended.
The family remains a bit divided about the matter of black versus white, but one grandson,
David Works, offered some wise words,
"There's a whole lot of good that happens when people talk to each other and get beyond
their assumptions."
"Monticello is a microcosm of the American story, right?
How willing have the American people been to acknowledge slavery as their history, and
not someone else's history?"
The story goes that Vincent Van Gogh, a brilliant but troubled artist, cut off his own ear to
impress a woman at a local brothel in 1888.
But there's more to this story.
He offered her his ear supposedly in an attempt to help heal her.
Granted, that's just one of many theories as to why he cut off a piece of himself, but
what we do know for sure is that Van Gogh never married, and he died in the arms of
his younger brother, Theo.
But just because Van Gogh never married, that doesn't mean he was celibate by any means.
In 2010, The Georgia Straight reported on Van Willem Romeijn, an artist who believes
Van Gogh is his great-grandfather.
Back in 1882, Van Gogh was thought to have fathered a son, Willem.
The child's mother, Clasina Maria Hoornik, was a prostitute who lived with the artist
for a time.
The book The Van Gogh Assignment states that Van Gogh visited Hoornik shortly after the
baby was born.
Whether this story is true or not remains unknown, and as for Romeijn's claims, there
aren't any definitive answers.
However, it is known that Vincent Van Gogh does have a descendant, also named Willem,
who works an ambassador at the Van Gogh Museum.
There are lots of myths out there about Pocahontas.
For one thing, the name "Pocahontas" was actually the Algonquian maiden's nickname.
Her real name was Amonute.
She earned her more well-known moniker because she was so spunky and playful as a child,
as "Pocahontas" means either "playful one" or "ill-behaved child."
And she wasn't madly in love with John Smith.
Instead, she married another settler named John Rolfe and had a son named Thomas.
Thomas Rolfe carried on the lineage, and as of the 1980s, according to Genealogy Bank,
there were estimated to be as many as 250,000 descendants of Pocahontas.
Even more interesting is the fact that Pocahontas' line spawned a number of presidential notables.
The most famous of these just might be First Lady Edith Wilson.
Not only was she married to President Woodrow Wilson, but thanks to a history-altering illness,
she may have even been the de facto president for a while.
Either way, she was related to the famous Native American on her father's side, as her
great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was Thomas Rolfe's daughter, Jane.
The Pocahontas Memorial Association even presented Mrs. Wilson with a bronze statuette of her
ancestor, which today is on display at the President Woodrow Wilson House.
Henry Ford built his first one-cylinder gasoline engine in 1893.
Three years later, he built the "Quadricycle," a prototype of sorts for what would become
one of the most iconic cars ever.
The Henry Ford Company was officially formed in 1901, followed in 1903 by the Ford Motor
Company.
Ford's first big-seller was the Model T. It was a working man's car, made so that it was
easy to operate, maintain, and handle.
Ford's invention changed the world and created an automotive empire that's still churning
out cars today.
Today, Ford's descendants continue to own stock in, work for, and manage the Ford Empire.
Notably, several power players are direct descendants of the man himself.
His great-grandson, Edsel Ford II, is on the board of directors, and another great-grandson,
William Clay Ford Jr., reigns as chairman of the board.
"By birth and by choice, I've been involved with the auto industry my entire life."
Despite his life of crime, Al Capone grew up in a steady household.
His immigrant father made a good living as a barber, while his mother raised three children.
However, their neighborhood was rough.
By the age of 14, Capone had been expelled from school for striking a teacher, and he
fell into the gangster life with mobster Johnny Torrio.
Two years later, Capone insulted a woman at the Harvard Inn.
The girl's brother slashed his face, earning him the nickname "Scarface."
In 1925, Capone took over the gangster syndicate and built up his empire to make as much as
$60 million annually from all that booze.
But Scarface had a soft side.
Soon after marrying Mae Coughlin in 1918, the couple had one son, Albert Francis "Sonny"
Capone.
Although he was born with congenital syphilis, Sonny recovered and received a good education.
One of his childhood friends was Desi Arnaz Jr., the son of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
But when Ball and Arnaz's production company produced a TV show called The Untouchables,
which featured Al Capone as one of its characters, Sonny sued the company.
Today, Sonny's daughter, Diane Patricia Capone, is all for keeping it in the family with her
book, Al Capone: Stories My Grandmother Told Me.
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