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How the Grandsons of the 10th US President Were Still Alive in 2020
Yep, you read that right. Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. and Harrison Ruffin Tyler, both grandsons of John Tyler, 10th President of the United States, were still alive in 2020.
President John Tyler, born in 1790, became president between 1841–1845 after the previous one, William Henry Harrison, died just thirty days into his term.
John Tyler, born at the end of the eighteenth century, was alive for the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the war of 1812, the Mexican American War, and died in the second year of the Civil War. Yet, he somehow still had grandchildren alive 158 years after his death.
How is it possible that a man born in 1790, alive at the same time as George Washington, still had grandchildren alive at the same time as you and I?
It’s all about young wives.
After John Tyler’s first wife died of a stroke in 1842, two years later, a 54-year-old Tyler took a 21-year-old Julia Gardiner as his second wife. Julia was five years younger than his oldest child and younger than three of his seven living children, making her the youngest first lady in history, and John Tyler the first president to marry while in the White House.
Together with Julia, Tyler had seven more children, bringing his total up to 15, and giving him the record of siring the most (legitimate) children of any president in American history.
John Tyler was 63 when his fifth child with Julia, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, was born in 1853.
Lyon followed in his father’s footsteps. After his first wife died, he married Sue Ruffin, thirty years his junior. Together, they had Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. and Harrison Ruffin Tyler in 1924 and 1928.
And the resemblance between these grandsons and their grandfather, born over a century before them, is striking.
Just imagine the lives of Harrison Ruffin Tyler and Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr.
They would never have met many of their aunts, uncles, and cousins because many died decades before Harrison and…
