Family
Robert Roosevelt's father was Cornelius Roosevelt (1794–1871) and his mother was Margaret Barnhill (1799–1861). He was also the nephew of James I. Roosevelt. He was the brother of Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the uncle of President Theodore Roosevelt and the great-uncle of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was to father many children. Some children were born from his marriage and others were born from his relationship with a long-term mistress. After the death of his first wife, he married his mistress. The offspring of his second wife were recognized as his stepsons.
First wife. The three children born to Elizabeth Ellis Roosevelt were Margaret Barnhill Roosevelt, John Ellis Roosevelt, and Robert Roosevelt Jr.. He purchased the Meadowcroft property at Sayville, New York in 1873 and it was later developed by his son as the John Ellis Roosevelt Estate. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.
- In 1879, John Roosevelt married Nannie Mitchell Vance, daughter of Hon. Samuel B. H. Vance, at the recently-built St. Nicholas Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, Fifth-avenue and Forty-eighth street, in New York City. Vance, who was active in New York State Republican politics, was a manufacturer who served as Acting Mayor of New York City for the month of December 1874.
Second wife. The two children born out of wedlock to Minnie O'Shea Fortescue were Kenyon Fortescue and Granville Roland Fortescue.
- Kenyon was destined for a career as an attorney.
- Major Granville Roland "Rolly" Fortescue married Grace Hubbard Fortescue (née Grace Hubbard Bell), who became a defendant in the notorious 1932 murder trial known as the "Massie Affair".
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Famous quotes containing the word family:
“In the capsule biography by which most of the people knew one another, I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it.... I sometimes believed what I said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert D’Or with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“What we often take to be family values—the work ethic, honesty, clean living, marital fidelity, and individual responsibility—are in fact social, religious, or cultural values. To be sure, these values are transmitted by parents to their children and are familial in that sense. They do not, however, originate within the family. It is the value of close relationships with other family members, and the importance of these bonds relative to other needs.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)