Book Description

Excerpt from The Ancestry of Benjamin Harrison, President of the United States of America 1889-1893: In Chart Form Showing Also the Descendants of William Henry Harrison, President of the United States of America in 1841 and Notes on Families Related The following work, for which the undersigned alone is responsible, it having proceeded neither from the suggestion, nor under the supervision, of any one else, is published for its merits as an attempt to show, not merely the paternal line, but all the other forefathers of an individual. The actual forefathers being arranged in a chart, data which have been found as to the collateral branches of some of the families are included, with the evidence for the direct lines, in this Introduction and the notes which follow it, headed by the various names, and an effort has been made to give an account, complete to date, of the Irwin and of the Ramsey family. It is not pretended that the pedigree adds to the distinction of a man who has been President of the United States of America. That office, to be sure, is neither the apex of a system of caste, like a European king's, nor the object of eighteen centuries' veneration, like the Pope's, nor the control of the lives and property of millions, like the Czar's or the ruler of China's; but, at the head of such a nation as ours has become, it is one of the very greatest positions on the earth. Its constitutional functions affect double the extent of territory that Charlemagne ruled. Surrounding the incumbent with no luxury, and rigidly subjecting him to law, it nevertheless resembles, with its unpretentious title, its actual power, its operation through a Senate, its preponderance in a hemisphere, that of the early Roman emperors, before the abrogation of republican forms. Few contemporary lives are as much studied as those culminating, or suggested to culminate, in the White House; and, as the ancestry of any man is a fact, important or otherwise, in his history, it is supposed that, while genealogists will value any work showing how far in each line, male and female, the ancestors of a living American can be traced, other people will be interested in such data concerning a President. The paternal line of the one whose term ended on the 4th of last March is unique from the standing anterior to the Revolutionary War, and the service during it and since. Moreover, while it is rare, in this young country, to find, even among the Presidents, any person all of whose great-grandfathers were Americans, he descends from many families known to have been here nearly two hundred years before his birth. This makes such a work relating to Benjamin Harrison a contribution to the genealogy of many of his fellow-citizens. All the known ancestors who lived in America are mentioned in the chart. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.