Saturday, February 17, 2018

Genealogy Story – The Roosevelt Connection


Background

In looking at our church bulletin for the coming week, I noticed that our senior citizen’s group, Thursday Fellowship, was going to be having their monthly meeting. The “speaker” was going to be an actress doing a dramatic presentation of Eleanor Roosevelt. I had just watched a YouTube clip of an old program from 1953 of “What’s My Line” where Eleanor was the mystery guest. With all of my deep roots in the early years of America, this got me to wondering if I could find a genealogical connection to Eleanor.


Presidential Trivia

I’ve written earlier about how I am connected to all 45 US presidents (*1). And that would have included Eleanor’s husband, FDR, as well as Theodore Roosevelt (and Eleanor). That would have made me a 20th+ cousin with a common ancestor back in the 13th century. But I wasn’t looking for that type of distant connection. I wanted something a bit closer and more personal.

There are two Roosevelts who were presidents. Theodore Roosevelt (26th president) was an uncle of Eleanor, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (32nd president) was Eleanor’s 5th cousin in addition to being her husband. So Teddy and Franklin were 4th cousins. That’s much closer than the relationship between Andrew Johnson (17th president) and Lyndon Johnson (36th president) who were 10th cousins, but not nearly as close as the relationship between John Adams (2nd president) and John Quincy Adams (6th president), who were father and son. If Hillary Clinton would have been elected recently she and her husband Bill (42nd president) would have been even closer.

Eleanor’s legal name was Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, but from an early age preferred to be called by her middle name, probably because her mother’s name was also Anna. Her mother died when she was 8 and her father before she turned 10. Her paternal grandparents had both passed before she was born, so she was raised by her maternal grandparents.


Searching for a Connection

I began by building a family tree for Eleanor using publicly available information (such as *2), as well as other family trees in ancestry.com. Since I knew that there were no Roosevelts in my family tree, I initially concentrated on her mother’s family lines. I followed each of them back to the 1600s or whenever that line came to America. While I did find a few family names that were also in my own family tree, none of them intersected. Most of her ancestors were in New York, but mine are primarily in Connecticut or Massachusetts. I then moved to her father’s family lines, following all the wives who married into the Roosevelt family. I was still not finding any connections. But when I reached her great-grandfather, something clicked.


An Unexpected Find

Eleanor’s great-grandfather was Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt (1794-1871) (*3). While that may not seem significant to most people, it was to me. It was a common practice for people to have a middle name that is their mother’s maiden name, and I quickly noted that Cornelius’s mother was Maria Helen Van Schaack, and that “He was the last full-blooded Dutch Roosevelt of his line.”

My wife’s family, Van De Car, were also Dutch and came to what was then New Holland in the early-mid 1600s. And one of the early marriages was between a Van Der Karre (as they then spelled the name) and a Van Schaack (*4). It only took a few more minutes of research to determine that Maria’s great-grandfather was Claas Van Schaack (1635-1709) and that he was the same individual who is my wife’s great*8 grandfather. Both the Van Der Karre and Van Schaack families lived in the Hudson River Valley in Kinderhook, NY (also the birthplace of president Martin Van Buren).

Thus, while Eleanor may not be closely related to me, she is my wife’s 6th cousin, 3 times removed. I had found what I was looking for – and it took less than two hours. I love genealogy!


Notes:



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