Thompson Family History

When New Orleans lawyer Ernest Benjamin Kruttschnitt died in 1906, praise came from all quarters. A partner in one of the city’s most illustrious law firms, Kruttschnitt (1852-1906) had tried many of the most important cases of his time. A long-time president of the New Orleans School Board, he twice turned down opportunities to become […]

I’m not sure when this whole ancestry thing became an obsession. I probably should have realized I’d gone too far when my own children, my own wife, got sick and tired of hearing me tell dinner-table stories about my ancestors. I still can’t understand why they aren’t interested — aren’t these their relatives too? Maybe the […]

Genealogical research often turns up more than you really want to know. I got a rude reminder of this before the Christmas holidays when a genealogist working in Cobourg, Ontario discovered that my earliest North American ancestor, William Thompson (1806-1849), assaulted a tailor, didn’t pay the fine, and spent time in the lock-up. The find […]

Who da man? That’s the question that has perplexed this blogger for years. By most accounts, William Boyce Thompson, the wily financier who was ambassador to Russia and left a fortune to botanical research, was the great patriarch of the family. Biographies describe him as a brilliant, though manipulative, self-made millionaire. Now a dissident family […]

I was recently sitting comfortably in a reading room of the Library of Congress, going through some papers left behind by Hermann Hagedorn, William Boyce Thompson’s biographer. I was minding my own business, trying to speed-read interviews related to the Magnate’s acquisition of a mining venture in Ely, Nevada, dreaming of my next cup of […]

There’s a picture on the Internet of a small cypress palm tree planted by railroad executive Julius Kruttschnitt, Sr., in 1897 at a train station in Burlingame, Ca., that had opened only a couple years before. The photo, taken in 1901, shows two small children playing near the palm, which was already rising above their […]

Imagine my good fortune after spending nearly a full working day at the Missouri Historical Society to stumble upon a new document written by my Great, Great, Great Grandfather J.R. Boyce (1817-1898). As close followers probably remember, we previously had the good fortune to conduct a graveside interview with J.R., who fled to Montana to avoid […]

After discovering that so many old family homes have been knocked down, it’s refreshing to find one that has survived.  That said, Julius Kruttschnitt’s magnificent summer villa at 2077 Forest View in Burlingame, Ca., came perilously close to suffering the pitiless blows of a wrecking ball. Builder Otto J. Miller bought the Julius Kruttschnitt, Sr., […]

We caught up with Boyce Thompson, Jr., on the eve of the release of his new album, Old Trains/Fast Tracks, to ask the reclusive “artist” a few questions about the forthcoming record, which has received faint praise, at best, from critics who dared to listen to preview copies. This is about the 20th album of […]

Dear Long-Lost Uncle Ough, I know that you are dead – in fact you died more than 130 years ago – but that’s no excuse for not writing to you about my recent trip to your old hometown of Sacramento. Things have certainly changed since you lived there, and not all for the better. But […]