Thursday, October 09, 2008

The Lost Kings of America

After the Revolutionary War, a group of people proposed that George Washington become the king of the new nation. He wisely declined, but Megan Smolenyak at Ancestry.com traced his lineal descendants to determine who would have inherited the hypothetical crown. Depending on the rules used, one of three people would be king (or queen) in the present day. Newsweek suggests that the best claim is held by Paul Emory Washington of Texas. In the intervening years:

She concluded that leadership would have passed not to men named Abraham or Teddy but to those named Lee, Felix or Frank. "We would have had a King named Spot, how cool is that?" Smolenyak muses of the son who would've fallen between King Bushrod, the first, and Bushrod II. And term limits? Not so much: King Larry would have been in power from 1935 to 1997, she says.
King Spot I. I like the ring of that.

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