Today (8 May) is the birthday of my grandfather. He'd be a miraculous 154.*
He was a farmer and a political activist, but he was also a bridge builder. When he was working at a site that was too far to travel home in the evening, my grandmother would leave the children with the housekeeper and go with him. The home place was between two of the bridges he built over the Suwannee, the Cone Bridge and the Godwin Bridge. The pilings of both can still be seen.
Both of my late mother's parents were charismatic and accomplished. When I was going through her files, I found a note she wrote about 2003 that said, "My father and mother [were] the happiest couple; I never heard them argue. I always wanted to be like them ... My father never even scolded."
He was born posthumously to an unmarried mother who showed up in his Florida home town at the end of the War, a couple of months after his father had died of smallpox at Fort Delaware. Both parents were from Georgia, but his father's Florida cousins took her in and claimed him as one of their own.
Click here for the image details page or here for the full-sized version (1374 x 384).
* And no, I'm not that old. He was nearly 60 when my mother was born, and she was in her 30s when she had me. There are two grandsons of President Tyler (born 1790) still alive.
