Help us find and improve next week's Connection Finder profiles: US Presidents

Question

Independence Day in the US is coming soon, so we're looking at presidents of the United States over the years in the Connection Finder next week, starting with John Adams, second president.

Here's who we're getting started on:

• Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the US
• William Henry Harrison, Ninth President of the US, and had the shortest tenure
• Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th President of the US

Can you help with these profiles, or expand their families? Adding relatives in any direction helps with connections. Every missing relative you add will make our connections to them closer.

Who else should we feature? We can't feature every US president (we only have room for eleven per week), but if we don't feature a profile you work on, we may use it sometime in the future. And, of course, all contributions help improve our shared tree.

We'll make a final decision on which ones to feature early next week.

Please reply here with what you're working on so that we don't duplicate our efforts. Thank you!

Help us plan other themes to feature for the rest of 2022 here.

Answer 1

This is a fairly limited category, not to mention the obvious return to Americentrism, but so be it-

I do like the thought of featuring Harrison. In the same vein of Presidents who never had the opportunity to serve a significant amount of time in office is James A. Garfield.

Comments

I did suggest making it Shakespeare themed (anniversary of when Shakespeare's Globe Theatre burnt down in 1613), but it seems the answer to that was a no.

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Ooh, I'd've loved a Shakespeare category- would have given me an excuse to work on the profile & Polish tree of John Gielgud, my favourite Shakespearean actor (though maybe I'll just work on it anyway at some point).

Ultimately, I don't usually mind the more regionally-specific themes, but I do wish they weren't always Anglo-/Franco-phone, as they tend to be, & this specific American category explicitly excludes immigrants & limits to a field of entirely men of almost completely Anglo background. Not to mention I feel Presidential genealogy is extremely overdone...

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It would have fit for the date, and would have been international.  Plus the daughter of Black American Shakespearean actor Ira Frederick Aldridge was honoured with a google doodle just the other day (she was an opera singer, composer and teacher, not a Shakespearean actor), which highlighted how international Shakespeare is.

Answer 2

George Washington was first president of the United States under the Constitution. Some individuals however consider the first president of the United States to be John Hanson who was president of the United States under the Articles of Confederation. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hanson-1872. His profile is connected and it contains his image. I will reach out to the American Revolution Project about updating his bio.

Update 6/24 - Bio is updated.

Answer 3

I realize that you can make a case for any one of them, but I would argue for Franklin Roosevelt.  Setting aside the length of his service, the role that he played in World War II makes him an international figure.

P.S. I resisted the temptation to argue for William Jennings Bryan.  Anyone that ran three times unsuccessfully deserves some recognition.

Comments

Bryan's profile is here.

If we started looking at candidates, aside from just Presidents, the go-tos for most times would include Lyndon LaRouche & Eugene Debs, but I'm not expecting that to happen, though it would make things more interesting.

Answer 4

I would love to see Theodore Roosevelt added. He was the youngest President at age 42. He became President after the assassination of President McKinley, but ran again and had a second term. He did so much for this country, including establishing our national parks and forests. He is also on Mount Rushmore.

Answer 5

Seems like it would make more sense to feature people associated with the American war of independence, like Nathan Hale, Light Horse Harry Lee, John Paul Jones, etc.,  rather than presidents.

Comments

Having individuals from different countries who were important to independence in those countries would be a great connections finder.  As an example, I recently worked on the profile of Jonas Basanavičius.  https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Basanavičius-3  He is known as the "Patriarch of the Nation" for Lithuania.

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Or even individuals from different countries who contributed to American independence; Bernardo de Gálvez, Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Comte de Rochambeau, Marquis de Lafayette, etc.

On edit: just for this week! not as a connections finder category (that would be an interesting top-level category, though; Toussaint L'Ouverture, Simon Bolivar, George Washington, Agustin Iturbide, etc. ("Heroes of national independence movements" is a bit unwieldy as a category though!)

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I'd like to see connections to notable or prominent anarchists featured, starting with, say, somebody like Wavy Gravy, if only he weren't still around, who went places on his Nobody For President Campaigns.

Answer 6

How about an International Presidents week.  We already had the U. S. Presidents this year, I think.  Also, the U.S. Presidents are already connected through the My Connections app, so at any time we can see to which U. S. President we are related.