Thompson Family History

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 [...]

Legend has it that a French assistant, Rocha, used to wheel an invalid William Boyce Thompson to the window of his remote Picket Post house in a bathtub on wheels just so he could watch the sun rise. Turns out that story is an urban legend — or should we say “rural legend” — invented by [...]

Dear Bill: I note in the book of yarns that you may want to hold them until you write a book and then use them. It may be that you will want to bring me into your book. I have no objections. If that is the case you may want a short outline of my [...]

Dear Bill: At the end of 1906 I went to N.Y. to be a big shot on Wall Street and found that to be a big shot I had to have a butler. So I got one. He was well-trained and the meekest man I ever knew. One weekend I found that, on a visit [...]

Dear Bill: My father, after serving in the legislature and helping write the Constitution of Montana, was elected Mayor of Butte. That meant I was free to run around the City hall where I met an “expug” who was City Jailer. He taught me to punch bag and the manly art of self-defense. I was [...]

Dear Bill: I have to spend a lot of time in bed trying to bring up the old red blood count and, having a lot of time on my hands, am writing you a lot of old time experiences. This is about a near killing of your Uncle Bill [William Boyce Thompson]. He was having [...]

Dear Bill: The old red blood count has not gone up yet so still have to stay in bed so another laugh for you if you can find it. Your Uncle Will [William Boyce Thompson] and I put on our skis at the old Boulder Chief mine to go to the Basin to spend Xmas [...]