A lineage article. The chain runs from President James Monroe (1758–1831) through his daughter Maria Hester Monroe, through the Gouverneur and Heiskell families of Washington, D.C., to Grampa Jim — James Monroe Clark — and from him to Elise and Fred.
The Clark.ged documents the connection in full, and it holds up. James Monroe, fifth president of the United States, married Elizabeth Kortright in 1786. Their younger daughter, Maria Hester Monroe, was born in Paris in 1803 while Monroe was serving as U.S. minister to France. Maria Hester was nineteen when she married Samuel Laurence Gouverneur at the White House in March 1820 — the first White House wedding on record. They had children; one daughter, Elizabeth Kortright Gouverneur, was born in Washington around 1824.
Elizabeth Kortright Gouverneur married Henry Lee Heiskell, a Virginia-born Washington attorney, in 1842. Their son Henry Lee Heiskell (born 1850 in the District of Columbia) married again in Washington; his daughter Elizabeth Kortright Gouverneur Heiskell was born there in April 1884. The Kortright name was passed twice in two generations, functioning as a kind of memorial to the Monroe connection.
Elizabeth Kortright Gouverneur Heiskell married Harry Freeman Clark in 1905. He was born in Maryland in 1871, served as Secretary and Treasurer of Washington Steel Co. and as a director of Riggs Bank, and died in 1944. Their son, born July 19, 1913, in Washington, D.C., was given the name James Monroe Clark. The choice was deliberate: James Monroe ran through the family the way Kortright did, a name too loaded to put down. He grew up in Washington, went to Sidwell Friends, crossed to New York at fifteen in 1928, read his way through Lehigh. He became Grampa Jim.
The GEDCOM also shows a sibling — another James Monroe Clark, born July 2, 1912, also in Washington — an older brother by a year, apparently given the same given name. Whether one was a middle name or the older died young is not documented in the current record. What is documented: the name passed, the line ran, and Fred is five generations out from the White House wedding.
That makes Fred the great-great-great-great-grandchild of President James Monroe and Elizabeth Kortright — through Maria Hester Monroe, Elizabeth Kortright Gouverneur, Henry Lee Heiskell (the younger), Elizabeth Kortright Gouverneur Heiskell, Harry Freeman Clark, James Monroe Clark (Grampa Jim), and Elise.