Old Money, Part 2

My David Crosby-inspired rabbit hole got deeper, I'm afraid. I'm not going to admit how deep, but here are a few more of his distant relatives, beyond what I posted in part 1 of Old Money.

I mentioned that the Rutgers family came into it somehow. David C's great-great grandfather, the one who married Harriet Clarkson, was adopted by his great uncle, Colonel Henry Rutgers and became his only heir. (Rutgers' sister Cathrina was David C's 4x great grandmother.) Rutgers, and his family before him, owned a lot of land on the lower east end of Manhattan, and they created even more land by dumping into the East River as well. There are streets down there named Henry and Rutgers, if you check the map. Not long before the Colonel died, he gave some money to the then-bankrupt Queens College in New Jersey, which promptly changed its name to Rutgers College in his honor, possibly hoping he would leave the institution more money in his will. He did not.

I note that Col. Rutgers was still enslaving humans until his death in 1830. In New York City.

Late in my rabbit hole immersion, I found out that David C. is doubly descended from William Floyd, the signer of the Declaration of Independence who was from Long Island and later the Mohawk Valley west of Albany and who still owned six people when he died in 1820. It was clear to me early on that David C was related through his father's side, since his dad's name was Floyd, but it turned out it wasn't just because of William Floyd's daughter Kitty and her descendents; Julia, the daughter of Kitty's brother Nicoll, is also David C's great-great grandmother. 

Julia married a Delafield, another very old East Coast family with a pedigree going back to 6th century France. Her son Francis was an esteemed doctor who was among those who tended to President William McKinley when he was shot in 1901. He tried to insist on having the president x-rayed, which was a new technology at the time. Other doctors resisted, and McKinley was not x-rayed. It's possible that if he had been, he would have survived his injuries.

A third connection to the William Floyd line, though kind of a side note: Floyd's third child, Mary, married Benjamin Tallmadge who was a spymaster during the American Revolution, and, I hear, was a main character in the recent AMC television series Turn, about the Benedict Arnold treason.

Another startling aspect of that section of David C's family tree: it contains two men who signed the U.S. Constitution (William Paterson and Rufus King), a governor of New York (John Alsop King), and Stephen van Rensselaer III, one of the last patroons and the equivalent of an ultra-billionaire. Essentially, a daughter descended from a lot of those folks married the fifth son of the billionaire, and one of that couple's daughters married the doctor who tried to save McKinley. Then one of their daughters was David C' grandmother.

My last two startling finds are located in the part of the family tree where I found the profligate Harry Crosby, who I wrote about in part 1. Harry's aunt, Angelica Schuyler Crosby, married a man named John Henderson, who was not that interesting, but his father was a U.S. Senator who co-authored the 13th Amendment to the Constitution (though he later voted against Andrew Johnson' impeachment), and his grandmother was Eunice Foote, the woman who is now credited with first recognizing the greenhouse effect and therefore predicting global warming.

There's more there but those are the simplest and most interesting things I've found.

Eunice Newton Foote