Catching up on our reading, we were pleased to come across a story at the redoubtable Cotton Boll Conspiracy on how the meaning of "generations" has, sometimes, a highly flexible- even elongated- meaning:
It seems rather remarkable, but two grandsons of John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States and a man born less than year after George Washington was first inaugurated as president, are still alive.
Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr., who turned 90 this week, and Harrison Ruffin Tyler, who turned 86 last November, continue chugging along, nearly 175 years after their grandfather assumed the nation’s highest office.
CBC goes on to note that:
John Tyler’s father, also named John, was Thomas Jefferson’s roommate at the College of William & Mary and the two remained lifelong friends. John Tyler Sr. was speaker of the House of Burgesses and he and Patrick Henry organized a militia company just prior to the American Revolution.
Also, John Tyler Sr. served in the Virginia legislature, where he, along with James Madison, proposed a meeting of states in Annapolis, Md., in 1786 to discuss granting Congress power to regulate commerce. The Annapolis Convention led to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation. He would later serve as governor of Virginia.
One can just imagine the bar bets Lyon Gardiner won claiming that his great-grandfather roomed with Thomas Jefferson. President Tyler fathered fifteen children by two wives over a 45-year period; the last, Pearl, was born in 1860. Tyler died in 1862.
No comments:
Post a Comment