The Founders’ Family Research
Family photograph tree, by Currier & Ives, c. 1871. [Library of Congress]
George Washington’s fellow founders reveled in genealogy as a means to explain themselves, their situation, and to some degree their new and important positions. Benjamin Franklin, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and others undertook research, wrote and sketched out their family relationships, and discussed the meaning of these connections. It is more challenging to locate a founding father who was not interested in his own family’s founding than one who was. Family history research, correspondence about genealogy, the exercise of that information in court, and the public display of it were a matter of course for John and Abigail Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, James Monroe, and many more.
By the late 18th century, expressing ambivalence about genealogy in the form of time and energy expended toward family history research, alongside a disavowal of the significance of family history, was common. Abigail Adams explained her own interest as purely academic, albeit intense. As she wrote about the document that would demonstrate the lineage of the Massachusetts Quincys’ descent from the Sear de Quincy, she explained that “I do not expect either titles or estate from the Recovery of the Geneoligical Table … yet if I was in possession of it, money should not purchase it from me.” “Can it be wondered at,” she asked her sister, “that I should wish to Trace an Ancesstor amongst the signers of Magna Carta[?]” The signers of that document, contrary to the narrative of monarchy, could claim a lineage of expanding political rights and participation, one assumes.
But surely a key aspect of the founding generation’s ambivalence about genealogy was associated with family roots abroad, usually in England. That interest came with a whole host of associations, some problematic given the recent revolution and the geopolitics of the 1780s and beyond, and some appealing, as Adams illustrated, in terms of longstanding ideas about authority and authenticity.
The founders all appreciated that a deeper knowledge of their family’s past required genealogical research. They all took care to explain the character of their interest in their family’s past. And they all made claims to the significance of family, both in general terms and in terms of their particular family’s background. The timing of these elites’ genealogical interests in the post-revolutionary period and the evidence of extensive pre-revolutionary family interest in genealogy among their ancestors also illustrate the deep tradition of genealogy — of which they were well aware — that had developed by the early Republic. For Franklin, the Adamses, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Monroe, and many others, riding the wave of political position often intersected with opportunities for and an impetus to genealogical research, reflection, and articulation.
When the founding generation turned to autobiographical reflection on the storied lives they had led, they began just as the previous generations did: rooted in family. Benjamin Franklin’s famous, posthumously published Autobiography began with his genealogical reflections and travels. When he turned to memoir, Thomas Jefferson began more casually, though his would remain as a manuscript. “At the age of 77,” he wrote, “I begin to make some memoranda and state some recollection of dates and facts concerning myself.”
Yet after this sentence of introduction, Jefferson spent the next passages describing his father’s family (“the tradition in my father’s family was that their ancestor came to this country from Wales … the first particular — information I have of any ancestor was my grandfather who lived at a place in Chesterfield called Ozborne’s and ownd the land afterwards the glebe of the parish”) and his mother’s family (“They trace their pedigree far back in England & Scotland, to which let every one ascribe the faith & merit he chooses”). When John Adams turned to autobiography he, too, began with family because, as he noted, “the Customs of Biography require that something should be said of my origin.” His relation of his paternal and maternal relatives was considerably longer than Jefferson’s, allowing him to fully root his own life in a long New England tradition. James Madison’s autobiographical manuscript treated his family the most briefly, but mirrored his father’s family record in recalling his birth when his parents were visiting relatives elsewhere in Virginia, thus echoing the family history.
Though he did not write an autobiography, or leave anything like a memoir, in the last years of his life George Washington evinced probably the most important and revealing investment in genealogy as a form of continuing importance for American elites on the cusp of a new century, hand on the tiller of a new nation. In 1791, Sir Isaac Heard, the Garter King of Arms at the College of Arms in London, wrote to President Washington with extensive information about the Washington genealogy and heraldry in England, as well as a request for more details about the family in America.
In addition to his expertise as England’s foremost genealogical authority, Heard was married to a Bostonian and had traveled in North America as a young man. His interest in the Washington family, Heard wrote, proceeded “from a sincere respect for the distinguished Character of Your Excellency” but also originated in his own American connections, “[c]ircumstances which have constantly excited my anxious Attention to the Scenes of that country & fervent wishes for the welfare of many families with which I had the happiness to be acquainted.” The materials included were, as one might expect from an expert genealogist, very detailed. There was a sketch of the arms and crest of the Washington family; the former includes a raven rising, with wings poised, from a cornet. There was an abstract of the will of Lawrence Washington, George Washington’s paternal grandfather, and two items of estate administration that formed part of Heard’s research into Washington family connections. And there was an annotated family tree. All in all, it was an impressive package.
In his response (nearly half a year later) to Heard’s interest in learning yet more information about the Washington family from American sources, George Washington first wanted to be clear about his own and his country’s use for genealogy. He noted, “This is a subject to which I confess I have paid very little attention. My time has been so much occupied … that but a small portion of it could have been devoted to researches of this nature, even if my inclination or particular circumstances could have prompted the enquiry.” Further, “[w]e have no Office of Record in this Country in which exact genealogical documents are preserved; and very few cases, I believe occur where a recurrence to pedigree for any considerable distance back has been found necessary to establish such points as may frequently arise in older Countries.”
The president dissembled. Washington had long been interested in the history of his family, and deeply invested in the symbols of his paternal lineage. The coat of arms that Sir Issac Heard sent from England was familiar from its long-standing and regular use by the Washington family. George Washington first commissioned silver with the Washington shield on it when he was in his twenties and had just taken full possession of Mount Vernon in 1757. Ready to furnish his home, he ordered a “Neat cruit stand & casters”; it was beautifully crafted and in the latest style. Two years later, he would marry Martha Dandridge Custis, who brought with her — and her children would add to these — items adorned with each of those coats of arms to the household at Mount Vernon.
Common to all of these founders’ founding stories is not only a cognizance of such things as heraldry, but also an appreciation for and willingness to undertake family history research, usually involving communication with other family members, sometimes involving travel, always relying on the same kind of work done by previous generations. Second, they all framed their family history pursuits in ambivalent terms by the later 18th century. And third, none eschewed family history because of the potential taint of aristocracy. For these sons and daughters of mostly middling means who had become elite by virtue of leveraging property and politics, surrounded by plenty of other families who were celebrating centuries of elite status in the British colonies, and then in the American nation, family history was still an obvious privilege and one that they embraced rather than eschewed.
From Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America by Karin Wulf. Copyright © 2025 by Oxford University Press and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.