President John Tyler took office in 1841, after William Henry Harrison died. He served until 1845, but wasn’t even nominated to run again in the 1844 election (there are reasons I’ll get into below). He died in 1862, but he has two grandsons who are still alive.

First, an historical aside: Harrison served about thirty days in office, most of them spent with the illness that would take his life. He was the first U.S. president to die in office, the shortest-serving U.S. president in history, and the first victim of the “Curse of Tecumseh,” so named because of his military victory over the Shawnee leader 38 years earlier.

The “curse,” which is only apparent in hindsight, held that the president elected every twenty years would die in office. This pattern persisted for over a century, through Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, FDR, and Kennedy. Zachary Taylor, who was elected in 1848 and died in 1850, is the only president to die in office outside of the “curse.” I remember when the curse was on everyone’s mind after Reagan was shot in 1981, but you could either say that he broke the curse or that the curse never really existed.

Now then, back to President Tyler.

When I say that two of his grandsons are still alive, I am not saying that two living men have memories of sitting at their grandpa’s feet as he regaled them with stories of how he was the Whig Party’s 1840 candidate for Vice President, when he wasn’t even really a member of the Whig Party; how he established the principle of vice-presidential succession, which was entirely unclear and unprecedented when Harrison died; or how many believe he was instrumental in the annexation of Texas. Tyler’s two grandsons were born in 1924 and 1928, more than sixty years after Tyler died. Their father, who was one among Tyler’s fifteen (!!!) children, was born in 1853, when Tyler was about 63 years old.

Tyler’s son was therefore around 71 and 75 when he fathered Tyler’s two living grandsons. One might say that the seed is strong in the Tyler bloodline (but that would be creepy and plagiaristic.) One might also note that while these men remained virile enough to father children well into their later years, to paraphrase Billy Crystal’s Harry, they were too old to pick them up. I don’t actually know if that’s true, though. For all I know, John Tyler and his descendants are all experienced bear wrestlers.

Despite the fact that he has living second-generation descendants, no one who is currently alive actually remembers John Tyler. Since he died 152 years ago, that should be obvious. It reminds me of a story I read a while ago reporting the death of the last surviving “Confederate widow.” This was apparently in 2004, when the Civil War had been over for 139 years (I mean in reality, not in the minds of some.) How could anyone married to a Confederate soldier still be alive? When the article said “Confederate widow,” it didn’t mean the wife of someone who died in the war, just someone who fought in it. The woman was a teenager in the 1920’s when she met and married a Civil War veteran, who was by then in his 70’s or 80’s, probably. So technically, she and others like her were “Confederate widows.” There’s something oddly romantic about it, maybe.

It just goes to show that history is strange. With people freezing eggs and sperm nowadays, we’ll likely be seeing children and grandchildren of people living long after the source of their DNA has shuffled off this mortal coil. (Don’t even get me started on cloning.) By the time the Millennials are grousing about “kids these days,” the whole concept of naming generations of people may have changed or disappeared. And John Tyler’s great-grandkids might still be going strong.

Photo credit: By Edwards & Anthony [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.