Happy Birthday to You, Mr. President!

Fifty-third Anniversary of Nation's Executive
Brings Thoughts of Part Virginia Played in the Careers
of the Illustrious Forbears of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Strange indeed would it be if the Old Dominion, Mother of Presidents, could not find some Virginian Motif in the genealogy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the nation's executive in whose honor thousands of feet will "tread the light fantastic" next Wednesday night when balls all over the land commemorate his natal day.

So it is that a careful scanning of President Roosevelt's ancestral tree brings to light the fact that Northumberland County in particular has a peculiar interest in all things pertaining to the New Deal chieftain. There is Ditchley House, ancestral home of the Lees and named for Ditchley in England, the home of the Earl of Litchfield who was a Lee. And it was the marriage of cousins of President Roosevelt with the Lees of Ditchley that connects the "Man of the Hour" with such famed families here as the founders of Stratford, Ditchley and Chantilly as well as with that of President Zachary Taylor who, genealogical research has placed as a distant cousin to the present executive, scion of Knickerbockers and Puritans.

Today Ditchley House, the center of historical interest due to the coming celebration of the President's fifty-third birthday anniversary and his connections with its historic family, is owned by Mrs. Alfred du Pont of Wilmington, Del., herself a Virginian allied to many prominent families in the State and bearing the maiden name of Gresham. [Editorial note: Mrs. Alfred du Pont's name was Jessie Dew Ball du Pont. Her mother's maiden name was Lalla Gresham.]

Ditchley House was built in 1688 but was later destroyed by fire. The present Ditchley structure, one of the show places of Northumberland County today, contains the same massive walls as old Stratford and other of the early homes, and the old kitchen has a fireplace that would readily roast an ox. Indeed the original frame of the "pig roaster" is still to be seen there.

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The original owner of Ditchley was Hancock Lee, a son of Colonel Richard Lee of Virginia, the first of the name in the colony. He was a loyalist to the House of Stuart and history records that he invited King Charles to come to Virginia. The merrie monarch, however, was too much infatuated with Nell Gwynn to accept, but regarded his faithful follower by making him secretary to the King's Council at Jamestown.

All of Richard's sons won renown and Hancock Lee played a most conspicuous part in Colonial affairs. His second wife belonged to a New England family related to President Roosevelt through the Delanos, and was the great-great aunt of the present New Dealer. This is the most direct connection of the President's with Old Dominion's Ditchley.

This branch of the Lee family, historians and genealogists point out, must not be confused with those other Lees of Marlboro, Mass., into which married President Theodore Roosevelt.

Another confusing marital tangle for genealogists was that of the fifth Lord Baltimore who married Charlotte Lee of Ditchley, England. This complication of the Lee name as well as that of the Ditchley estate provoked several unfounded connections to be established before it was at length straightened out.

To trace the line of descent of that English family is to follow Charlotte's marriage to Lord Baltimore when she became the mother of Ellenor Calvert who in turn wed Jacky Custis, stepson of George Washington.

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And now to begin at a more recent date and trace the lineage of another Lee group backwards, we find that Mrs. Robert E. Lee and her husband, the general, were distantly related as has been known, but their kinship came from the Stratford Lees, being descended from Colonel Richard Lee and Hancock Lee of Ditchley. Mrs. Robert E. Lee belonged to the Randolph family of "Chatsworth" on the James, and through the vein, descended likewise from the Lees of Ditchley, while on her father's side, through the Calverts, she traced her lineage back to the Earl of Litchfield whose daughter, Charlotte Lee, married the fifth Lord of Baltimore.

So we find our present great leader, and that great leader of the past linked by family ties albeit many generations old.

Now let us glance back in President Roosevelt's past again to that eventful year when the Mayflowers sailed from the shores of Holland for the new world. Aboard her was one Isaac Allerton who had been living in Leyden. He was a keen trader, a man of great business acumen, the records tell us. With him on his pilgrimage to America came his wife, Mary; their three children, Bartholomew, Remember and Mary, and a man servant listed as John Hooke. Fellow passengers were William Brewster and his family. When Isaac's wife, Mary, died he married the daughter of William Brewster, Fear Brewster, and she bore him a son named Isaac. The Pilgrim father died in 1659 and the boy was reared by his Brewster relatives and lived in the home of Elder Brewster.

From Mary Allerton, the daughter of Isaac the Pilgrim, descends through the Cushmans President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

From Isaac Allerton the junior descends in direct line Zachary Taylor, twelfth President of the United States. His daughter, Sarah Allerton, whose mother was Fear Brewster, married as his second wife, Colonel Hancock Lee of Ditchley, Virginia. The daughter of this union, Elizabeth Lee, became the mother of President Zachary Taylor, hero of Palo Alto and Buena Vista.

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Pursuing our interesting study of genealogy even farther, we find, according to a recently uncovered marriage bond of his daughter, Sarah Knox Taylor, that she married one Jefferson Davis, senator from Mississippi, secretary of war of the United States and later president of the Confederate States. Sarah Taylor is revealed as the sweetheart and romance of Jefferson Davis's early life. After her untimely death from fever, he married the ambitious Varina Howells.

But meager and sparse as the old records are there is still another chapter of President Roosevelt Roosevelt's forbears in which Virginia has a share. Isaac Allerton, the son of the Pilgrim who was the fifth signer of the Compact and who died in New Haven after the Dutch, or Knickerbockers, drove him from his residence in New Amsterdam, inherited some of the wanderlust of his father.

It is recorded that he moved to Virginia where he performed valiantly in the Indian Wars, serving under John Washington, founder of that family in America. So the Old Dominion has that claim upon the New Deal leader's kin, too.So, just as the United states has had two Adams as chief executives; two Harrisons and two Roosevelts, this shows that Isaac Allerton the Pilgrim has given to America two Presidents--Zachary Taylor and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It is interesting to note in this connection an old New York, or New Amsterdam, record concerning these same Roosevelt forbears. It recounts how Isaac Allerton the Pilgrim "resided in the house beyond the Wall," which means what is now the locality of Wall Street, where he was most unpopular with the Indians due to his shooting of a squaw he caught stealing his grapes.

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Another bit out of this old Amsterdam setting includes the registry of the old French church there, known as "du Esprit," and dated 1628. It records the baptism of Peter Faneuil who later moved to Boston to inherit the fortune of uncle, Andre Faneuil, owner of famous Faneuil Hall. And the old church records of the Waloons in New York also mention one, "Nicholas Roosevelt" who on the paternal side was the founder of the Roosevelt clan in the new world.

And it is that same Faneuil Hall which has boasted within its venerable walls 13 captains and the Ancient and Honorables, the nation's oldest military unit, all of whom were grandfathers of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

And so Wednesday night in hamlet, town and city across Virginia's rolling miles, wherever President Roosevelt's birthday anniversary is being celebrated and the infantile paralysis sufferers' fund is being augmented, celebrants are really paying homage again to the Old Dominion's Colonial builders of families as well as of empire.