Grandson of John Tyler dies
Lyon Tyler Jr. did not meet his paternal grandfather when he was growing up in Virginia in the 1930s. He never had the chance to walk through fields with his grandfather or hear his stories about an earlier time — tales about growing up when George Washington was president and of going to Monticello, where he listened as a family friend played the fiddle. The friend was Thomas Jefferson.
In later years, Dr. Tyler went on to become a Navy officer, a lawyer and a professor of history — and practically the living embodiment of almost the entire history of the nation.
Until his death on Sept. 26, Dr. Tyler had been one of two living grandsons of John Tyler, who was president of the United States from 1841 to 1845. Dr. Tyler was born 63 years after his grandfather died. He was 95 when he died at a hospital in Franklin, Tenn., of complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said his daughter, Susan Selina Tyler.
As hard as it may be to fathom, just three generations of the Tyler family connected the 18th century to the 21st. John Tyler, the future president, was born in 1790. His father, also named John Tyler, had been Jefferson’s college roommate at William & Mary and was a lifelong friend.
In 1840, John Tyler was the running mate — and the second half of the campaign slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” — of Whig Party presidential candidate William Henry Harrison. One month after taking office in 1841, Harrison died, and Tyler became the 10th president.
John Tyler, whose lineage is nothing if not complicated, was the father of 15 children, more than any other president in history. He and his first wife, Letitia Christian, who died in 1842, had eight children.
In 1844, he married Julia Gardiner, with whom he had seven more children. Their fifth child, born in 1853, was Lyon Gardiner Tyler Sr. The elder Lyon Tyler, who was president of William & Mary from 1888 to 1919 and was credited with saving the college from closing, had three children from his first marriage to Anne Baker Tucker. After her death, he married Sue Ruffin in 1923, when he was 70.