The Bush Family Tree

Five generations of an American dynasty
By Daniel Nasaw


Jeb Bush will be a candidate for president during the 2016 election, but the Bushes and their relatives have been at the heart of American business and politics for more than a century. Through five wealthy and powerful generations, the families of George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Pierce have produced investment bankers, a magazine publishing executive, a state supreme court justice, a railroad industrialist, a senator, two governors, and, of course, two presidents. Now, Jeb Bush hopes to be the third. Take a look at the faces below to explore the Bush family tree with their profile below. 

Samuel Prescott Bush

• Born 1863
• Died 1948
• Married to Flora Sheldon

Samuel Bush was the first of the family’s modern era to achieve wealth. Born in New Jersey, he got an engineering degree from the Stevens Institute of Technology and began a long career in the railroad industry. His work brought him to Ohio, where he settled in Columbus and eventually rose to become president of Buckeye Steel Castings, an industrial manufacturer. A Democrat, Samuel Bush served as president of the National Association of Manufacturers, was a charter member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and founded an anti-tax group.

Flora Sheldon

• Born 1872
• Died 1920
• Married to Samuel Prescott Bush

Flora Sheldon, the daughter of a Columbus merchant and banker, married Samuel Bush in 1894. She was killed in a car accident in 1920.

George Herbert Walker

• Born 1874
• Died 1953
• Married to Loulie Wear

George Herbert Walker was an investment banker who founded the family vacation home in Kennebunkport, Me., where the first President Bush entertained world leaders. He was born in St. Louis to a successful Catholic family and educated in Britain. He founded a firm in St. Louis and later moved his family to New York to run W. A. Harriman & Co., a precursor to Brown Brothers Harriman. Mr. Walker enjoyed the New York high life -- he owned Rolls Royces, ate and drank lavishly and employed two butlers. As president of the U.S. Golf Association, he donated the trophy for the Walker Cup competition.

Loulie Wear

• Born 1874
• Died 1961
• Married to George Herbert Walker

Loulie Wear was born in St. Louis, Mo., and married George Herbert Walker in 1899. A biographer of the Bush family describes her as patient in the face of her husband's foul temper, criticism and domineering manner.

James Robinson

• Born 1868
• Died 1932
• Married to Lula Flickinger

Born to settlers of Union County, Ohio, James Robinson was a prominent lawyer who rose to become a justice of the Ohio Supreme Court. After his death, he was eulogized by his colleagues on the bar as having a “high and comprehensive conception of the judicial function and a generous understanding of the fundamental principles on which our American institutions rest.”

Lula Flickinger

• Born 1875
• Married to James Robinson  

Prescott Sheldon Bush

Investment Banker, U.S. Senator

• Born 1895
• Died 1972
• Married to Dorothy Walker

Prescott Bush was born in Columbus and moved east to attend St. George’s boarding school in Newport, R.I. After graduating from Yale, Bush served as a captain in an artillery unit in World War I in France. Prescott Bush entered the investment banking business, in 1931 becoming a partner at the newly formed Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. After years in part-time local politics in Greenwich, Conn., Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Republican in 1952 to serve out the term of a Democrat who died. He was re-elected in 1956, and after a single full term retired to resume his career in investment banking.

Dorothy Walker

• Born 1901
• Died 1992
• Married to Prescott Sheldon Bush

Born into privilege, Dorothy Walker was educated at Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut. She married Prescott Bush in 1921. She was a distinguished athlete and valued self-effacement and good manners, once chastising her son, then vice president, for reading the printed text as Ronald Reagan delivered a speech.

Marvin Pierce

Magazine Publisher

• Born 1893
• Died 1969
• Married to Pauline Robinson

Marvin Pierce, a distant relation of 14th president Franklin Pierce, was a senior executive at the McCall Corp., a publisher of women’s magazines. Like just about every other figure on the Bush family tree, he was an accomplished athlete, winning renown for his achievements at Miami University in Ohio. He settled in Rye, N.Y., a tony suburb of New York. But his success was marred by terrible tragedy – in September 1949, he ran his car off the road to the train station. He was injured and his wife Pauline Robinson, Barbara Pierce's mother, was killed. In June 1952, he married journalist Willa Gray Martin.

Pauline Robinson

• Born 1896
• Died 1949
• Married to Marvin Pierce

Born in Ohio, Pauline Robinson met Marvin Pierce while the latter was a student at Miami University and she was studying to become a teacher. Pauline was described by a biographer of Barbara Bush as a bit of a spendthrift who doted on Barbara’s elder sister while treating her more coldly. In September 1949, Pauline was riding to the train station with her husband so that she could drive the car home after dropping him off, when a bone china coffee cup she had placed on the seat between them began to tip. When Marvin Pierce reached for the cup to steady it, the car ran off the side of the road and crashed into a tree and a stone wall. He was injured and she was killed.

George Herbert Walker Bush

• Born June 12, 1924
• Married to Barbara Pierce

George Herbert Walker Bush grew up in Greenwich, Conn., where his family had a driver and handyman, a cook, and maids. At Phillips Academy prep school, he was a middling student but a star athlete. He joined the Navy on his 18th birthday, trained as a pilot and deployed to the Pacific, where his plane was shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft fire. After Yale, he moved to Texas to enter the oil business. In 1966 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Later he was chairman of the Republican National Committee, ambassador to the U.N., chief diplomat in China and director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1980, he was elected vice president under Ronald Reagan, and in 1988, president.

Barbara Pierce

• Born June 8, 1925
• Married to George Herbert Walker Bush

The first Bush first lady was born in New York and raised in Rye, a Westchester County suburb. In 1941, she met George H. W. Bush at a dance in Greenwich, Conn. They married in January 1945. Barbara moved with George Bush as his career in the oil business and later politics took him around the country and beyond. In the White House, she devoted herself to promoting adult literacy. As recently as 2013, Mrs. Bush seemed reluctant to throw herself behind her son Jeb’s presidential ambitions, but in March 2015 her name was attached to a Jeb Bush fundraising letter.

George Walker Bush

U.S. President, Texas Governor

• Born July 6, 1946
• Married to Laura Welch

George W. Bush was born in New Haven, Conn. Raised in Texas, he followed his father and grandfather to Yale and served in the Texas Air National Guard. After earning a business degree from Harvard, he married Laura Welch, worked in the oil business and was an owner of the Texas Rangers Major League Baseball team. Bush was elected governor of Texas in 1994. In 2000, he was elected president despite losing the popular vote to Vice President Al Gore. In 2004, he was decisively re-elected.

Laura Welch

Former First Lady

• Born Nov. 4, 1946
• Married to George Walker Bush

The second Bush first lady hails from Midland, Texas, where her husband also grew up. She worked as a school teacher and librarian before marrying George W. Bush. The couple have two daughters, twins Barbara and Jenna.

Robin Bush

• Born Dec. 20, 1949
• Died Oct. 11, 1953

Pauline Robinson “Robin” Bush died of leukemia at age three, seven months after waking one morning pale and lethargic with bruises on her legs. Her death devastated the family, and in its aftermath, her mother Barbara Bush’s hair began to turn gray though she was just 28 year old.

John Ellis "Jeb" Bush

• Born Feb. 11, 1953
• Married to Columba Garnica

Jeb Bush followed his father to Phillips Academy in Andover. While on a study-abroad program in Mexico, he met Columba Garnica Gallo. The couple married three years later. Bush attended the University of Texas. Later, the family moved to Venezuela, where he worked for a bank. He settled in Florida, where he worked for his father's 1980 and 1988 presidential campaigns, in real estate and banking, and served as Florida secretary of commerce under Gov. Bob Martinez. He was elected governor on his second try, in 1998, and won re-election in 2002. After leaving office in 2007, Bush returned to the business world, serving on corporate boards and holding ownership stakes in a consulting and investment firms.

Columba Garnica

• Born Aug. 17, 1953
• Married to John Ellis "Jeb" Bush

Columba Garnica de Gallo Bush hails from Leon, Mexico, and met Jeb Bush while he was a student there. The daughter of a farmer, she became a U.S. citizen in the 1980s. She shies from the spotlight and takes on few of the public duties customary to a political wife. As first lady of Florida, she became an advocate for domestic abuse victims.

Neil Mallon Bush

Businessman

• Born Jan. 22, 1955

Named for Neil Mallon, his father’s mentor in the oil business, Neil Bush settled in Colorado after working on his father’s 1980 presidential campaign. He soon became embroiled in the savings and loan scandal. The Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan Association, of which he was an outside director, collapsed in 1988, costing the government about $1 billion to bail out depositors. Neil Bush and his partners ultimately agreed to pay $49.5 million to settle an FDIC civil suit alleging negligence and insider dealings. Today Neil Bush sits on corporate boards and is chairman of the Points of Light Foundation, a non-profit founded by his father that promotes volunteerism.

Marvin Pierce Bush

Businessman

• Born Oct. 22, 1956

The youngest of the Bush sons, Marvin has also kept the lowest profile. He went to the University of Virginia and has worked as a businessman, investment manager and corporate board member. As his brother’s tenure in the White House ended, Marvin Bush helped establish the George W Bush presidential library.

Doro Bush

• Born Aug. 18, 1959

The youngest child of President George H.W. Bush, known as Doro, spent part of her adolescence in New York City while her father was ambassador to the U.N. Bashful about her family’s station, she was driven to school by a chauffeur but asked to be dropped off down the street, according to a biography. She has a sociology degree from Boston College. She lived for a time in Maine, where she worked for the Maine tourism office, and later moved to Washington, where she worked at a hospital.

Barbara Pierce Bush

• Born Nov. 25, 1981

Barbara Pierce Bush was seven when her grandfather was sworn in as president, and 19 when her parents moved into the Executive Mansion. At that point, she was a student at Yale, the alma mater of her father, grandfather and great-grandfather. In 2008 she co-founded the non-profit Global Health Corps. On Inauguration Day in January 2009, she and her twin sister, Jenna, penned an article in The Wall Street Journal offering warm advice to the Obama girls (“Have fun and enjoy your childhood in such a magical place to live and play”).

Jenna Welch Bush

• Born Nov. 25, 1981

Jenna Bush Hager was seven when her grandfather was sworn in as president and 19, and a freshman at the University of Texas when her parents moved into the White House. She was married in 2008 to Henry Chase Hager, the son of a former Virginia lieutenant governor, and in 2009 was hired as a special correspondent on NBC’s “Today” show.

George Prescott Bush

Texas Land Commissioner

• Born April 24, 1976

George Prescott Bush was born in Texas, attended Rice University in Houston, and later law school at the University of Texas. He taught school in Miami, served as an officer in the U.S. Navy reserve, worked in private equity and at an investment firm, according to a campaign biography, before following his forbears into politics. In November, he was elected Texas land commissioner.

Noelle Bush

• Born July 26, 1977

John Ellis Bush Jr

• Born Dec. 13, 1983

Photos: Getty Images, George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, Ohio Supreme Court, Ancestry.com/U.S. State Department, Stevens Institute of Technology


Source: http://graphics.wsj.com/jeb-bush-family-tree/?mod=e2tw