Arabella Winthrop-Fairfax
Amateur genealogist and philanthropist, Newport, Rhode Island (and, some summers, a family estate outside Florence)
Profiles by Arabella Winthrop-Fairfax
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Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) — Giorgio
Giorgio de Chirico's eerie, dreamlike cityscapes founded what's known as the "metaphysical art" movement, and his influence on the later Surrealists is generally considered profound rather than incidental — one of those cases where an artist's own work is almost less important, historically, than the door it opened for everyone who came afterward. I sit on the boards of three museums and have spent a fair amount of my life around exactly this kind of work, and I confess I find de Chirico's paintings unsettling in a way I still can't fully articulate, even after decades of looking at them properly rather than merely owning the sort of art one is expected to. There is something admirable, I think, in an artist whose most lasting contribution is a mood, an atmosphere, rather than a single iconic image everyone can name. It is a subtler kind of legacy, and subtlety is not something my own rather grand family background has ever encouraged me to properly appreciate until fairly recently in life.
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Desmond Tutu (1931-2021) — Desmond
Desmond Tutu is, I think, one of those figures whose achievements make my own family's much-discussed lineage look rather beside the point — a South African Anglican archbishop who spent his career opposing apartheid, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, and later chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, choosing forgiveness and healing as a matter of deliberate national policy rather than sentiment. I have sat on any number of charitable boards in my life and understand, better than most, how difficult it is to get institutions to do the generous thing rather than the convenient one. Tutu built an entire process around asking a wounded country to do exactly that, in public, at enormous personal and moral cost. I find I have very little to add from my own rather sheltered vantage point except genuine admiration, and the occasional uncomfortable awareness of how much easier my own life's charitable gestures have been by comparison. Some legacies simply outclass the frame you're tempted to put around them.
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Kofi Annan (1938-2018) — Kofi
One does encounter, in genealogical work, a great many families who arrived somewhere on a ship with a title and called it destiny; Kofi Annan arrived at the United Nations through the considerably harder route of decades inside the organization itself, rising to become its seventh Secretary-General and sharing the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001 for revitalizing an institution that a great many people, myself rather lazily included at the time, had written off as ornamental. I am trying, in my later years, to be more honest about which accomplishments in this world are inherited and which are earned rather slowly, meeting by meeting, from within. Annan's belongs entirely to the second category. He is credited, quite rightly, with restoring the UN's credibility and championing human rights at a moment when both were badly needed, and I find I admire that kind of patient, structural work rather more than I once admired an old family name — mine very much included.
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Astrid Kirchherr (1938-2020) — Astrid
Astrid Kirchherr photographed the Beatles during their early Hamburg years and, in doing so, helped shape the visual image an entire era of popular music would come to be recognized by, which is a rather more consequential thing than the modest word "photographer" tends to suggest. I know almost nothing about popular music, prewar or postwar, my own tastes running toward opera and portraiture of a considerably older vintage, but I find something genuinely compelling in the idea of one person, working quietly with a camera in a nightclub district, having that much lasting influence over how millions of people would eventually picture four young men from Liverpool. It reminds me, oddly, of the portrait painters my own family patronized for centuries, whose job was likewise to decide, permanently, how a person would be remembered by everyone who came after. Kirchherr did that job for an entirely different century and an entirely different art form, but the underlying act — deciding, visually, how history will picture someone — strikes me as remarkably similar across both.
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Isabella Bird (1831-1904) — Isabella
Isabella Bird became the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographical Society after a career of genuinely adventurous travel writing, at a time when a woman traveling alone, extensively, and being taken seriously for it, was rare enough to be its own small act of rebellion. I have spent a good deal of my own life on genealogical research, tracing where families and names have traveled through history, and Bird's journeys represent precisely the sort of primary, lived experience I only ever encounter secondhand, through documents and old letters rather than by actually going anywhere difficult myself. I was educated at a Swiss boarding school and have summered outside Florence for most of my life, which is travel of an entirely different, considerably softer character than Bird's, and I am aware of that gap every time I read about a woman who went somewhere genuinely uncomfortable and wrote about it honestly rather than decoratively. Her induction into a society that had, before her, seen fit to exclude women entirely feels like the kind of overdue correction worth dwelling on properly.
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Liam Neeson (b. 1952) — Liam
Liam Neeson's career, spanning "Schindler's List" and decades of drama and film beyond it, has the kind of range and gravitas one associates with actors who were never merely famous, but genuinely, durably respected by their peers as well as the public. I watch very little popular cinema, a fact I am only slowly becoming less smug about, though I was recently and rather secretly delighted by a costume drama my granddaughter insisted upon, so my expertise here is limited to what the history books and my own family will admit to enjoying. What strikes me about a career like Neeson's is its sheer duration — the kind of longevity that, in my own rarefied circles, we tend to associate only with old institutions and older money, rather than with a working actor building and rebuilding a reputation, film by film, over an entire lifetime. It is, I think, a more honest sort of endurance than the inherited kind I am rather more familiar with, and I find myself unexpectedly moved by that distinction the longer I sit with it.
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Fernando Alonso (b. 1981) — Fernando
Fernando Alonso, a two-time Formula 1 World Champion, has managed something rather unusual in professional sport, which is simply lasting — remaining respected for skill and longevity well past the point at which most of his early rivals retired. I confess I know embarrassingly little about motor racing as a discipline, my own family's relationship to speed having historically been confined to sailing, but I find the idea of sustained excellence, across changing teams and eras and machinery, genuinely admirable regardless of the sport. There is something almost genealogical about tracking a career like his across two decades, watching how it branches and adapts, not unlike tracing a family line through shifting circumstances while some essential quality persists. I am aware that I am, as ever, drawn to the longevity and the pedigree of the achievement rather than any technical understanding of what he's actually doing behind the wheel, and I try to catch myself doing that, though I don't always entirely succeed. Twenty years at the top of anything deserves real respect, technical understanding or not.
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Deborah Harry (b. 1945) — Deborah
As Blondie's lead singer, Deborah Harry helped drag punk and new wave out of the clubs and into the mainstream, and has spent decades since supporting music education and LGBTQ+ rights. I will admit, with the self-awareness I try to bring to these pieces, that my own musical education runs rather more toward opera and eighteenth-century portraiture than punk, and that I find her genre 'fascinating in theory, faintly alarming in practice' — which is precisely the phrase my grandchildren use about my feelings on most modern technology, so I take the hint. What I do recognize, across that considerable distance, is the discipline underneath the spectacle: an entire sound and stage persona built deliberately, sustained for decades, and then turned toward genuinely useful causes rather than left to gather dust as mere nostalgia. I did not grow up with a jukebox in the house. I am glad, all the same, to have learned something about hers.
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Amanda Nunes (b. 1988) — Amanda
Widely considered one of the greatest mixed martial artists in the sport's history, Amanda Nunes became the first fighter to hold two UFC championship belts at once, an achievement that came from her own body and years of training rather than from anything handed down. I confess this is precisely the kind of story that unsettles my usual genealogical instincts in the best way — there is no old family line here to trace, no inherited title to note in the margin, only a woman who built her authority in a cage, repeatedly, in front of people who could see exactly how hard she'd worked for it. I have never once had to prove myself in that unambiguous a fashion, and I try, when I write about people like her, to resist the urge to admire it from too safe a distance. She simply did the thing, twice over, better than anyone else alive.
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Kim Basinger (b. 1953) — Kimberly
Born Kimberly Kay Basinger, she became an Academy Award-winning actress and has spent much of her career quietly devoted to animal rights and to protecting the natural land around her hometown of Braselton, Georgia. I sit on the board of a horticultural society myself and have restored a garden or two, so I recognize a fellow traveler when I see one — someone who came to conservation not as a fashionable cause but as an attachment to a particular patch of earth she loved first. It is easy, in my circles, to support these causes from a comfortable distance; it is a different thing entirely to fight for the literal ground under your childhood home. I find myself unexpectedly moved by that specificity, the way her advocacy stays rooted to one real place rather than drifting into abstraction. Fame gave her a platform, certainly, but the instinct underneath it reads, to me, like something she'd have done regardless of who was watching.
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Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) — Henry
I spent twelve years restoring a historic garden and thought myself terribly patient about growing things slowly; Henry David Thoreau spent two years at Walden Pond and produced a book that has outlasted every hedge I have ever planted. He wrote of simple living and close, unhurried observation of the natural world, and later penned an essay on civil disobedience that would go on to shape Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. decades after his own quiet death. There is something bracing, from where I sit, about a man who deliberately chose less — I am only slowly, at fifty-eight, becoming aware of how much I have never had to choose. My family's papers trace back to the 1650s on one side and a minor Italian title on the other, and I mention that not to compare but to admit the contrast plainly: Thoreau built his authority out of a pond, some beans, and his own convictions, which strikes me, the older I get, as the far harder and more honest inheritance.
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Nathan Hale (1755-1776) — Nathan
Tracing a name like Hale is the sort of small genealogical puzzle I adore, though this one needs no digging to matter. Nathan Hale was a young Connecticut schoolmaster turned Revolutionary War soldier, captured behind enemy lines and executed at twenty-one, remembered ever since for the words he is said to have spoken before his death: that he regretted having only one life to give for his country. I have spent a great deal of my own life cataloguing old family lines and inherited houses, and I will confess that a man who gave everything he had, at that age, with nothing handed to him for it, humbles the whole exercise rather. There is no title in this story, no estate, no old shipping fortune underwriting the gesture — only a young man's conviction. I find I keep returning to that plain fact rather than any romantic embellishment of it. It is, I think, the rarest kind of legacy: one earned entirely in a single afternoon, and never spent since.
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José Andrés (b. 1969) — Jose
Jose Andres is a celebrated chef, which on its own would be a perfectly respectable career to write up and move along from, except that he founded World Central Kitchen, which has now served hundreds of millions of meals to communities in the aftermath of natural disasters and humanitarian crises around the globe. I sit on several charitable boards myself, and I am acutely aware of the difference between funding something from a comfortable distance and actually building an operation capable of showing up, repeatedly, wherever the need happens to be worst that particular month. Andres apparently built the second kind. There is a category of philanthropy that photographs beautifully at a gala and accomplishes very little, and another category that is unglamorous, logistically exhausting, and actually feeds people the same week a hurricane or earthquake has upended their lives. I try, not always successfully, to notice which kind I am actually supporting with my own giving. Reading about Andres was a useful, slightly humbling reminder of the difference between the two.
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Tyler, The Creator (b. 1991) — Tyler
I confess Tyler, The Creator's music was entirely outside my frame of reference until my granddaughter played me a track over the summer with the particular patience one reserves for an elderly relative who might need things explained twice. What struck me, once I did a bit of proper reading, was less the music itself and more the sheer restlessness of the reinvention -- a Grammy-winning musician who founded his own festival, Camp Flog Gnaw, and has moved fearlessly across music, fashion, and animation rather than settling into one comfortable identity and defending it for decades, which is rather the opposite of how my own family tends to operate, clinging to the same name and the same handful of institutions for centuries as though changing course were faintly indecent. There is something bracing about someone who treats reinvention itself as the actual art form. I am not certain I fully understand the appeal, in the way one is never quite certain about things genuinely outside one's own experience, but I find I admire the nerve of it rather more than I expected to.
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Brandon Stanton (b. 1984) — Brandon
Brandon Stanton has, in effect, built an entire body of work doing precisely what I do for my own family tree, except with none of the built-in advantage of already knowing the subjects matter to somebody. I trace lineages because the people at the end of them are, by definition, my relations; Stanton photographs and interviews complete strangers on the street and finds, apparently, that their stories are just as worth telling as anyone's inherited name. 'Humans of New York' has raised tens of millions of dollars for causes ranging from hospitals to scholarships, built entirely on the premise that an ordinary, unconnected person's life is interesting enough to fund something real. I will admit this rather humbles my own hobby, which depends rather heavily on people having had the good fortune of being written down by somebody important enough to keep records about. Stanton makes the record himself, one stranger at a time, and it turns out that works just as well, possibly better, at moving people to actually give money away.
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Ronald Wayne (b. 1934) — Ronald
There is a particular kind of footnote in family and company histories alike -- the co-founder, the silent partner, the name that appears in the founding documents and then quietly recedes from the story everyone remembers. Ronald Wayne is exactly that sort of figure: he stood alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at Apple Computer's very beginning, drew the company's original logo himself, and contributed early ideas that helped set the whole enterprise on its course, before the world came to know only two of the three names involved. I find myself unusually moved by figures like this, perhaps because my own family's ledgers are so thoroughly obsessed with whose name gets carved onto which building. Wayne's contribution doesn't come with a wing or a foundation attached to it, and yet it is real, documented, foundational. It has made me reconsider, not for the first time, how much of what gets remembered about any beginning depends on who happened to stay in the room the longest.
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Ron Howard (b. 1954) — Ronald
I'll confess I approached Ron Howard's file expecting the sort of gilded Hollywood lineage I usually find so easy to get swept up in -- and instead found a rather more interesting story of someone who simply worked, continuously, from childhood onward. Born Ronald Howard, he was already a working actor as a small child, which is not the same thing at all as being born into comfort; it is being born into a job. That he went on to direct 'Apollo 13' and 'A Beautiful Mind,' winning an Academy Award, and is spoken of throughout the industry not for temperament but for professionalism and generosity toward younger colleagues, struck me as the sort of accomplishment that has nothing to do with pedigree and everything to do with simply showing up, decade after decade, and being decent to people along the way. I catch myself, sometimes, being too impressed by old names and older money. Howard's story is a useful corrective -- a genuinely earned reputation, built one set at a time.
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Paul Farmer (1959-2022) — Paul
There is a particular kind of person I find myself unexpectedly moved by, precisely because their story is so unlike my own, and Paul Farmer is very much one of them. A physician and anthropologist, he co-founded Partners In Health and dedicated his career to bringing genuinely high-quality medical care to some of the poorest communities in the world — Haiti, Rwanda, and beyond — not as a charitable gesture from a comfortable distance but as sustained, difficult, on-the-ground work that reshaped how the entire field thinks about health equity. I have never once, in my whole life, had to worry seriously about access to medical care, and I am slowly, at 58, becoming more honest with myself about how rare that particular kind of security actually is. Farmer chose to spend his considerable talents where the need was greatest rather than where the comfort was, which is a choice I suspect I would have found very difficult to make myself. He deserves every ounce of the respect his life's work has earned him.
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Megan Thee Stallion (b. 1995) — Megan
I confess I approached this one expecting my usual sport — some tangled, centuries-deep family line to unravel over tea — and found instead something rather more bracing: no ancient pedigree required. Megan Thee Stallion built her name entirely in the present tense, with Grammy-winning hits like 'Savage' and 'Hot Girl Summer' that I am reliably informed were inescapable, and — this is the detail I keep returning to — she completed a bachelor's degree the entire time she was doing it. There is no ancestral shortcut in that sentence. It is simply years of work laid end to end. I have spent a great deal of my life being charmed by lineage and old institutions, and I am slowly, occasionally uncomfortably aware of how little that charm has cost me personally. A story like this one corrects me rather usefully: the accomplishment here belongs entirely to the person who built it, in real time, with no family estate underwriting a single semester of it. I find I admire it rather more than I know how to properly say.
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Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) — Isaac
Isaac Asimov was a prolific science fiction author and biochemist whose "Foundation" series helped define an entire genre and inspired generations of both readers and working scientists after him, which strikes me as a rather remarkable double credential to hold at once — imagination and rigor in the same career, rather than choosing between them. I confess my own reading tends toward literary fiction rather than science fiction, a gap in my education I am only slowly, and rather belatedly, becoming aware of. What I find genuinely admirable, on reflection, is how much serious scientific thinking apparently runs underneath his fiction rather than merely decorating it — imagined futures built on something closer to actual extrapolation than pure fantasy. I have spent a great deal of my life around inherited institutions and titles that impress on the surface; Asimov's sort of legacy, built from sheer prolific output and genuine intellectual range, is the kind I am increasingly inclined to find more impressive the longer I look at it.
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Simón Bolívar (1783-1830) — Simon
Simón Bolívar is exactly the sort of name that sends me down a genealogical rabbit hole for an entire afternoon, because leading the independence movements of several nations from Spanish rule isn't just one biography, it's the founding thread of an entire continent's family trees afterward. I'll confess my own family history runs toward old shipping fortunes and inherited titles, which makes someone like Bolívar a useful corrective for me — here is a life defined by actually building something from a revolutionary conviction rather than simply inheriting a position and calling it destiny. I try to catch myself when I'm more impressed by lineage than by earned achievement, and Bolívar's story is a clean example of the latter: liberation won through sustained, dangerous effort across years and multiple countries, not granted by any family name. There's a reason his name still marks a nation, a currency, and countless streets and plazas across a continent; that kind of enduring, geography-spanning legacy is rarer than any old family crest, mine included, and I say that with real admiration rather than my usual dry irony.
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Neil Young (b. 1945) — Neil
Neil Young has had a genuinely long, restless career, moving across rock and folk for decades in a way that has apparently kept him relevant to musicians several generations younger than he is, which is not a thing I can say about most of the recording artists from his era whom I might, if pressed, be more naturally inclined to appreciate. My own musical tastes run firmly toward opera and eighteenth-century portraiture, and I will admit an old habit of quietly filing popular music several rungs beneath what I considered serious art, a habit I am slowly, if incompletely, growing out of. What strikes me about Young's career, reading about it properly rather than dismissing it from a comfortable distance, is the sheer restlessness of it, an unwillingness to simply repeat whatever had already succeeded. That is a harder thing to sustain across decades than consistency is, and I suspect I have historically given it rather less credit than it deserves, simply because the genre wasn't mine.
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Roger Bannister (1929-2018) — Roger
Roger Bannister became the first person ever to run a mile in under four minutes, a barrier that had apparently defeated every runner who'd attempted it before him, and then went on to have an entirely separate, serious career as a neurologist, which I find almost more impressive than the record itself. It would have been perfectly understandable, and rather tempting, for him to spend the rest of his life simply being the man who broke the four-minute mile. He didn't. He built a whole second, demanding profession afterward, treating actual patients rather than resting on one extraordinary afternoon on a track in Oxford. I have, at various points in my own comparatively unstrenuous life, been tempted to let one modest accomplishment carry rather more weight than it deserved, and Bannister's refusal to do that with something genuinely historic strikes me as the more instructive part of his story, even if it is the part that gets mentioned considerably less often.
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Jeremiah Owyang (b. 1972) — Jeremiah
Jeremiah Owyang made his name as an early researcher of social media and what's now called the sharing economy, subjects I will confess I understand largely through the patient explanations of my assistant, who handles my email and has on more than one occasion had to explain to me, slowly, what an app actually is. I find this entire category of expertise faintly alarming and genuinely fascinating in roughly equal measure, which I gather is a fairly common reaction among people my age confronting how quickly ordinary commerce and social life have been rearranged by technology I did not grow up with and have never quite caught up to. Owyang was apparently identifying these shifts early, before most people, myself very much included, understood what was happening or why it mattered. I try to resist being dismissive of expertise simply because its subject matter is unfamiliar to me; that particular blind spot has embarrassed me before, and I'd rather admit ignorance plainly than pretend a sharper understanding I plainly do not have.
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Nathaniel Philbrick (b. 1956) — Nathaniel
Nathaniel Philbrick writes narrative history with a novelist's instinct for pacing, In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower among his best-known work, and I confess a certain fellow-feeling with any historian who treats archival digging as something closer to detective work than dusty obligation, since that is exactly how I have always approached my own genealogical projects, however much smaller in scope. Winning the National Book Award for that kind of research-driven storytelling suggests he manages something I find genuinely difficult: making meticulous factual accuracy read as compellingly as invented drama, without sacrificing either. Mayflower in particular covers ground uncomfortably close to my own mother's side of the family tree, and I have always appreciated historians willing to complicate the tidier version of that story that families like mine were, for a very long time, rather too comfortable repeating. Good history should occasionally make you reconsider your own family's favorite anecdotes, and from what I understand of his work, Philbrick's tends to do exactly that.
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Saint Dominic (1170-1221) — Dominic
Saint Dominic founded the Dominican Order in the early thirteenth century, and I find institutional lineages nearly as fascinating to trace as family ones — an idea, planted by one determined priest eight hundred years ago, branching outward into an entire structure of religious and educational institutions that persists, recognizably, into the present day. It is the sort of long, improbable continuity I usually only find in the oldest family lines I research, except here the inheritance is intellectual and spiritual rather than a title or a piece of land. I do try to catch myself being overly impressed by old institutions purely for their age, since longevity alone is not the same thing as merit, but the Dominican Order's actual influence on education and religious thought across eight centuries seems to justify the admiration on its own terms, not merely on the strength of having survived a long time. Some founding gestures simply keep proving their worth generation after generation, quite apart from any grandeur attached to their origin.
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Xavier Woods (b. 1986) — Xavier
I will confess that professional wrestling is not a world I have any natural fluency in, and my first instinct on reading about Xavier Woods was the sort of mild, reflexive condescension I am trying, with limited success, to train out of myself in my later years. It turns out he holds an actual doctorate in psychology, which he apparently pursued alongside a demanding wrestling and video-game-streaming career, and I found myself genuinely delighted, the way I am when a genealogical record turns up an ancestor who defies whatever tidy assumption I'd already made about their branch of the family. High-energy public performance and rigorous academic credentials are not supposed to occupy the same person, according to the sort of lazy categories I was raised with, and Woods simply ignores that boundary entirely, apparently building both halves of his life at full intensity rather than choosing one respectable lane. It is precisely the kind of surprising, cross-disciplinary detail that makes tracing anyone's actual story so much more interesting than the shorthand version everyone settles for instead.
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Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) — Vincent
Vincent van Gogh is, of course, one of the towering names in art history now, The Starry Night and the sunflowers reproduced on everything from museum totes to dormitory walls, and it would be easy, in my usual genealogical way, to go hunting for some grand family lineage that explains the genius. There isn't one, really, not in the way I usually find with the families I trace — his was a life of real financial precarity, painting furiously with very little recognition or money to show for it during his lifetime. I catch myself, writing that sentence, wanting to soften it into something more palatable, and I think that instinct itself is worth naming rather than indulging. Van Gogh's story is not a tidy one about inherited advantage finally paying off; it is a story about someone producing extraordinary work despite almost no support for it at all, work the world only decided to properly value once he could no longer benefit from that judgment. I find that far more sobering than charming, and I think it deserves to stay that way.
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Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965) — Felix
Felix Frankfurter served as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice and was, by every account, an influential legal scholar whose contributions to constitutional law have outlasted him considerably. I find the law rather more intimidating than most of my genealogical pursuits, admittedly, though I have come to appreciate over the years that constitutional scholarship and genealogy share a certain temperament — both require a real reverence for precedent, for how the past constrains and shapes what comes after it, whether one is tracing a bloodline or a body of case law. Frankfurter's influence was of the sort that operates quietly, through argument and interpretation rather than headline-making rulings, which I confess I find more impressive than the louder kind of legal fame. My own family has produced a great many people who inherited institutions; rather fewer who genuinely shaped one from within. Frankfurter belongs, by every account I have read, to the latter and considerably rarer category.
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Nina Dobrev (b. 1989) — Nina
Nina Dobrev built her name playing a lead role on "The Vampire Diaries" and has since gone on to a broader career across film and television, which strikes me, watching from a considerable and rather old-fashioned distance from popular culture, as no small feat of career management. My granddaughter is considerably better versed in this particular corner of television than I am, and it was in fact at her insistence that I came to understand quite how devoted an audience that show commanded in its day. Making the leap from a single beloved, genre-specific role into a sustained, varied career is a transition many performers attempt and rather fewer manage cleanly. I find I admire that kind of deliberate, ongoing reinvention rather more than I admire fame that simply happens to a person once and then coasts. Dobrev appears to have treated her early success as a beginning rather than a peak, which is, I think, the harder and more admirable choice.
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Serena Altschul (b. 1970) — Serena
Serena Altschul has spent her career as a journalist and correspondent covering arts and culture, which I will admit is precisely the sort of beat that appeals to me most — the quieter corner of the news that isn't chasing catastrophe but is still doing the serious work of paying attention to what a society makes and values. I sit on the boards of three museums myself and have some small sense of how much unglamorous effort goes into covering the arts properly, with real context rather than mere novelty. It is, frankly, an underappreciated discipline of journalism, treated by some as softer than it actually is. Altschul's decades of steady, informed coverage suggest someone who took that work seriously long after it stopped being fashionable to. I find myself instinctively more moved by careers built on this kind of patient, specific expertise than by the flashier variety, perhaps because patient expertise is the one thing my own rather charmed life has taught me to genuinely respect rather than simply inherit.
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Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) — Sylvia
Sylvia Plath's poetry collection "The Colossus" and her novel "The Bell Jar" secured her place as one of the most influential writers of her generation, and I confess I return to her work more than almost any other twentieth-century poet on my own shelves. There is something in the precision of her language — every word doing exactly the work it was assigned, nothing wasted — that I find genuinely thrilling in the way I imagine others find a well-argued legal brief thrilling. I lost my husband Daniel some years ago, though I've been told that comparison is not quite mine to make with Plath's own considerably harder losses, and I try to be careful about that. What I will say is that her writing has an honesty about difficult interior states that most literature, including a great deal of what I was raised to admire, simply doesn't attempt. That kind of unflinching clarity on the page is its own rare form of courage, whatever else was true of the life around it.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) — Harriet
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," a novel that genuinely galvanized abolitionist sentiment in the years before the Civil War — one of those rare instances where a piece of literature can be said to have actually moved the course of a nation, not merely reflected it. I find this sort of thing endlessly compelling from a genealogical standpoint: how much of what we now consider historical inevitability was, in fact, set in motion by one determined writer at a desk. My own family's American history begins in the 1650s, comfortably removed from the moral urgency Stowe was writing into, and I try, not always successfully, to hold that discomfort honestly rather than paper over it with old-family pride. Stowe used the considerable platform available to a writer of her era for something that actually cost her something to say plainly. That is, I think, the harder and rarer kind of courage — not simply having a voice, but using it for something beyond oneself.
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Vivian Vance (1909-1979) — Vivian
Vivian Vance is remembered, rather charmingly and rather narrowly, for one role — Ethel Mertz on "I Love Lucy" — though she was an Emmy-winning actress with a career well beyond that single beloved part. I find myself thinking about this often in my genealogical work: how a family, or a person, can spend a lifetime accumulating a whole record of accomplishment and still be remembered, if remembered at all, for the single most visible chapter. There's no shame in it, I should say — being unforgettable in even one role is a rarer thing than most people manage in an entire career, myself very much included. I confess I watch almost no popular television, though my granddaughter recently sat me down for an episode, and I understand now why an entire generation still speaks so fondly of that particular pairing on screen. It takes genuine craft to make comedy look effortless. Vance clearly had it, whatever the credits chose to lead with.
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Empress Joséphine (1763-1814) — Josephine
Empress Joséphine has always struck me as a woman one could genuinely discuss horticulture with, which I mean as the highest compliment I know how to give. Beyond her rather more famous role as Napoleon's first wife, she cultivated an extraordinary garden at Château de Malmaison and had real, lasting influence over fashion in her day — the sort of soft power that history books tend to underrate because it doesn't come with battles attached. I have spent the better part of a decade restoring a public garden myself, and I can attest that the patience required to grow something beautiful and lasting is not remotely a lesser skill than the ones that get one's portrait painted in a crown. My own genealogical curiosity always wants to know what became of the gardens after their famous tenders passed on, and Malmaison's survival as a place people can still visit feels like the truer monument, more than the marriage ever was. Some legacies are best measured in roses rather than titles.
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Adele Astaire (1896-1981) — Adele
One does love tracing a sibling act back through the genealogical record, and Adele Astaire's is a particularly charming one — she and her brother Fred performed together on Broadway and in the West End to great acclaim, years before Fred went on to his solo film career and, one gathers, considerably more lasting fame. There's something almost poignant about being the elder half of a double act whose partner eventually became the more remembered name; I find myself unexpectedly moved by that sort of quiet eclipse, having spent a fair amount of my own life adjacent to people whose accomplishments overshadowed my own rather less dramatic ones. Adele's own talent was, by every contemporary account, entirely real and entirely her own, not merely borrowed shine from her brother. I restored a garden over twelve years that will likely be remembered, if at all, as something my family once owned rather than something I built — so I confess a certain fellow feeling for anyone whose name gets quietly filed under someone else's.
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Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) — Rosalind
Rosalind Franklin's story is, in a way, about lineage of an entirely different sort than the kind I usually spend my afternoons tracing — the lineage of an idea, and who properly gets credited as its origin. Her X-ray diffraction images were crucial to discovering the structure of DNA, work now recognized, belatedly, as making her one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century, though 'belatedly' is doing rather a lot of work in that sentence. I find myself unusually invested in this one, because I have spent a great deal of my own life quietly, comfortably credited for things I did very little to earn, simply by virtue of a name and a family line — and here is a case of exactly the opposite happening to someone who earned her contribution entirely and had to wait decades for the record to reflect it properly. It strikes me as a useful correction to sit with. Recognition, I am slowly learning, does not reliably follow the person who actually did the work, and Franklin's story is proof enough of that on its own.
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Sophie Scholl (1921-1943) — Sophie
I ought to say plainly that Sophie Scholl's story humbles me in a way very little else I've researched for these profiles manages to. She was a German student and member of the White Rose resistance group, distributing anti-Nazi leaflets at genuinely great personal risk, and she is remembered, entirely rightly, as a symbol of moral courage. My own life has never once required that kind of courage, not remotely, and I find I have no clever genealogical detail or family-line observation to soften this one with, nor should I try to. There is a particular kind of comfort I have lived in my entire life that makes stories like hers land less as inspiration and more as a quiet, useful correction — a reminder of what actual risk, actual conviction, actually costs a person when it's real rather than theoretical. I do not think I am owed any credit for simply noticing this. But I would rather notice it honestly than fold her story into my usual register of charming self-awareness, because it deserves considerably more gravity than that.
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Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) — Eleanor
I'll confess my first instinct with a name like Roosevelt is genealogical delight — old American family, considerable standing, the sort of pedigree I could happily trace for an afternoon over tea. But Eleanor Roosevelt's actual accomplishment rather outpaces her lineage, and I ought to correct my own instinct here rather than dwell on it. As First Lady and later a diplomat, she helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, work that required years of genuinely difficult negotiation among people who did not agree on much, and she is remembered, rightly, as a tireless advocate for human rights and social reform well beyond what her position alone would have required of her. Plenty of people in comparable circumstances to hers have done considerably less with the platform available to them; I include myself in that reckoning more than I'd like to. What I find myself admiring is that she treated the position as an obligation to actually accomplish something, rather than simply to occupy it gracefully, which is a distinction I try, not always successfully, to hold myself to as well.
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Monica Seles (b. 1973) — Monica
Monica Seles won nine Grand Slam singles titles and is rightly enshrined in the Tennis Hall of Fame, and I will say that tennis is one of the very few sports about which I can speak with any real authority, having played it since childhood on courts considerably more forgiving than the ones on which she actually competed for a living. There is a particular grit to a career built on nine major titles that has nothing to do with the leisurely weekend matches of my own experience — that number represents years of relentless, professional-grade discipline, the kind my standing weekly appointment with a terrifying personal trainer only faintly approximates. I am aware, and try to remain aware, of how differently the word 'discipline' functions in a life like mine versus a life spent actually competing at that level for one's livelihood. Nine Grand Slams is not a hobby's achievement. It is the record of someone who treated the sport as the entire, serious center of a working life, and it shows.
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Louise Erdrich (b. 1954) — Louise
Louise Erdrich is a National Book Award-winning novelist whose work draws deeply on her Ojibwe heritage to explore Native American life and history, and I confess this is precisely the sort of profile that makes my usual genealogical enthusiasms feel rather small by comparison. I spend a good deal of my time tracing old family lines back to the 1650s or occasionally to a minor Italian title several generations removed, treating it, I'll admit, as a delightful parlor game more than anything of real consequence. Erdrich's work does something considerably more serious with heritage — using it to illuminate an entire history that institutions like the ones I sit on the boards of have not always told honestly, or told at all. I find myself genuinely humbled reading about a body of work built on ancestry that mattered in ways mine, whatever its old ledgers claim, has never once had to prove itself against. One learns, slowly and later than one would like, which family stories were simply inherited and which had to be fought for.
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Warren Beatty (b. 1937) — Warren
Warren Beatty is one of those Hollywood names that has genuinely earned its longevity, moving fluidly between acting and directing across decades in an industry that discards people far more often than it rewards patience. Bonnie and Clyde and Reds sit at rather different ends of the spectrum — one a stylish crime drama that reshaped American film, the other a sprawling, ambitious epic about revolution — and steering both to acclaim, years apart, suggests real range rather than a single lucky formula. I don't move in film circles myself, though I did sit through a costume drama recently at my granddaughter's insistence and was, I'll admit, secretly delighted by it, which perhaps qualifies me as slightly less out of touch than I present. What I find genuinely admirable about a career like Beatty's is the discipline behind it — those aren't quick projects, and sustaining ambition across that many years, in an industry built on being forgotten quickly, takes more than charm. It takes the kind of patient, deliberate work I try, not always successfully, to bring to my own genealogical digging.
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Doris Lessing (1919-2013) — Doris
I do adore a good genealogical detective story, though Doris Lessing's own path to a Nobel Prize is less a matter of lineage than of sheer, sustained literary force — her sweeping, insightful novels earned her that recognition on merit alone, which I find myself admiring perhaps more than I do the accomplishments of people born, as I was, into rather more comfortable circumstances. I have a degree in art history from a small women's college, acquired largely because 'one should study something,' and I confess a certain envy of writers like Lessing who built an entire body of serious work from genuine intellectual labor rather than inherited advantage. My granddaughter recently insisted I read one of Lessing's novels, and I found myself rather more moved by it than I expected to be, catching myself, midway through, wondering whether I've spent quite enough of my own leisured life actually grappling with difficult ideas rather than merely admiring other people's grappling with them from a comfortable distance. A useful, if humbling, thought.
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Constance Bennett (1904-1965) — Constance
One does enjoy tracing a name like Constance Bennett back through the family trees of old Hollywood, and I confess a particular delight in discovering that she was, by most accounts, one of the best-compensated actresses of the early nineteen-thirties, praised especially for her sharp wit in the classic screwball comedies of the period. There is something enormously satisfying about a woman who commanded that kind of financial success on her own considerable talent, at a time when very few women, in any industry, were permitted anything like it — a fact I note with genuine admiration rather than the faint condescension I'm occasionally guilty of toward self-made success, having never had to earn a single dollar of my own. My late husband adored the screwball comedies of that era, and we watched a great many of them together over the years; I have always thought sharp wit aged rather better on screen than almost any other quality. Bennett's career strikes me as exactly the kind of earned, glittering success I find myself unexpectedly moved by.
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Herbert von Karajan (1908-1989) — Herbert
Herbert von Karajan led the Berlin Philharmonic for decades and became one of the most recorded conductors in the history of classical music, which is precisely the sort of subject I can discuss with genuine, unreserved delight, having attended more performances of that orchestra's recordings, live and recorded, than I probably should admit in a column meant to be about someone else entirely. There is something in the sheer discipline of conducting an ensemble that large, for that long, and being recorded so extensively that one's interpretations become, essentially, the standard by which others are measured for generations afterward. My late husband and I attended several performances under conductors trained in Karajan's own tradition, which I mention not to name-drop, though I suppose I have, but because that kind of lineage in classical music genuinely fascinates my genealogist's instincts nearly as much as an old family tree does. A great conductor's influence, like a great family line, tends to travel further and longer than anyone realizes at the time.
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Milton Friedman (1912-2006) — Milton
Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in economics, and his ideas about markets and monetary policy went on to shape economic thinking rather significantly around the world, which I mention with the particular caution of someone whose own relationship with money has never once required any actual theory, only inheritance and the occasional trustee's meeting I am dutifully invited to observe. I try, not always successfully, to catch myself before pontificating about 'markets' or 'hard work' with any real authority, given that neither has ever tested me the way it tests most people. What I can say honestly is that Friedman's influence on how entire governments think about economic policy is the kind of legacy built on ideas alone, tested and argued over decades by people with genuine expertise, rather than on the sort of inherited position I was simply handed at birth. That distinction matters more to me the longer I sit on these various boards, listening to people who actually built something, rather than merely stewarding what was already there.
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Barry White (1944-2003) — Barry
Barry White built an entire beloved career around his remarkably deep, velvety voice and a catalogue of romantic soul ballads that made him one of the defining musical icons of the 1970s, a decade I remember rather better from within a very different sort of drawing room than the one his music was actually written for. I'll admit my own musical education runs almost entirely to opera and the occasional restrained Baroque recital, so White's genre is territory I approach as a genuinely curious outsider rather than a natural devotee. What strikes me, reading about him properly for the first time, is how singular and unmistakable that voice apparently was — the sort of instrument that cannot be taught or inherited, only discovered and then, evidently, worked at for decades. I find I rather envy anyone whose gift is that immediately, universally recognizable, since so much of what I was given came with a family name attached rather than earned entirely on its own unaided merits.