The Length of a Generation

Today's post begins with a history lesson.  Ask people what they know about the history of Texas and many - in this country at any rate - will respond with blank faces.  Some who were brought up on stories of cowboys and the Wild West might mention Davy Crockett and the Alamo, but few would go beyond that.  One of my schoolboy fascinations was the geo-political history of the USA; as a result I remembered that Texas was briefly an independent republic before being annexed by the United States in 1845. 

My attention was drawn this week to an item broadcast on CBS Evening News of 6th March 2018, which informed me that the President who signed the Decree of Annexation was John Tyler.  Tyler became the first Vice-President to succeed to that role when his predecessor, William Henry Harrison, died in April 1841 after only a month in office.  The focus of the news item this March was the discovery that - amazingly for a man born in 1790 - two of his grandsons are still alive!  The younger of the two, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, was interviewed with his son at the family home in Charles City, Virginia, which President Tyler had renovated for his second wife, Julia.

Julia was only 22, and some thirty years younger than her husband, when they married after the death of his first wife, Letitia, in 1842.  After raising a family of eight children with Letitia, the President went on to have a second family of seven with Julia.  Of these, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, the third son and fifth child was born in 1853.  Lyon's life followed the pattern of his father, to the extent that he re-married following the death of his first wife.  Lyon's second wife was 35 years his junior, and bore him three sons, the youngest of whom died in infancy.  Harrison, the second son, was born in 1928 when his father was 75 years old.

As a result of learning about the Tyler family this week, my thoughts have been focused on my own.  As a small boy, a pattern of births was revealed to me that was probably one of the earliest seedlings of my interest in genealogy.  Three girls were born in successive years following my birth, as cousins who had married before my arrival started their respective families.  I was the last of one generation; these three, born of three different sets of parents, were the start of the next one.

I have often commented with some amusement on the Biblical precedent followed by my father, who was John, born of Zachariah and Elizabeth (see Luke ch. 1).  However, unlike the Baptist, dad wasn't executed in his mid-thirties, but lived two days beyond his eightieth birthday, and gave me the best upbringing his meagre status would allow.  What I hadn't realised until after his death, was the fact that he missed only one unit of being that most fortunate of creatures, 'a seventh son of a seventh son'. 

I knew from the list in the family Bible that this Zachariah and Elizabeth had a family of twelve, of whom three children died within their first year.  I knew all the rest of them, five of whom were my uncles, but had never done the sum of adding in the son who died, which makes dad the seventh son.  I never knew anything of my grandfather's family until starting my researches, and I have often wondered just how much dad knew of them ... like so many families, it just wasn't a topic of conversation.  I now know that grandfather was one of ten children and just as my father was the youngest son, so was his father; with three elder sisters and one younger one, he was the sixth son of the family.

I have called this article the length of a generation; in the case of the Tyler family from the birth of John to the birth of his youngest surviving grandson was 138 years.  We can't compete with that! From my grandfather's birth to my own was a mere 81 years, and looking back another generation, my father's birth was only 79 years after his grandfather.  And it's a progressive trend, for the earliest I can go back is only one more generation and from the end of the eighteenth century I can say that my grandfather was born only 69 years after his grandfather!

I mentioned the succession of annual births that marked the transition from my generation to the next;  My favourite personal example of this phenomenon is the fact that, after migrating to Lancashire in search of work, my eldest great-aunt had married, raised her family of six children and died - albeit at the early age of only 45 - some four years before the turn of the twentieth century!