Rockefellers and GROK

I'm at the East Side Freedom Library again, enjoying the space and the air conditioning. It's a hot day in Saint Paul, although we seem to be due for a thunderstorm and then cooler weather beginning tomorrow. I haven't been searching the shelves today; instead I brought my copy of Ferdinand Lundberg's 1937 book, America's 60 Families. I've been filling in some details of the Rockefeller family tree. It's interesting, as I get closer to the present, that some of the descendants seem to lead more or less "normal" lives. I'm not sure if this is a result of "reversion to the mean", where inheritors of wealth and status sometimes become more middle class as the generations pass. Or of carefully crafted facades of normality, where members of the leisure class living on trust fund proceeds seek to blend in with the "regular people", either from a sincere desire to live a less ostentatious life or because they hope to fly under the radar if the peasants ever take up their torches and pitchforks.

An example of this might be a pulitzer-prize-winning journalist and professor named Sarah Stillman. Now in her early forties, she seems to have a stellar academic pedigree and rise to the highest ranks of the liberal elite press (Atlantic, New Yorker, etc.). Her author profile describes her as "an inspiring example of what a self-confident teen can achieve". She scrupulously avoids mentioning any personal information, and search results remark on this fact. GROK reported, "There is no publicly available information in the provided references or elsewhere that specifically names Sarah Stillman's parents. The sources focus primarily on her professional achievements, education, and journalistic work, but do not disclose personal details about her family, including her parents' identities."

So it would be a speculation to suggest she might be a Rockefeller. It might be a complete coincidence and Ms. Stillman may be a prodigy who sprang from humble roots to earn "simultaneous Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Anthropology from Yale University in 2006, graduating summa cum laude with exceptional distinction." She then "pursued graduate studies as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University." These things can happen, and it looks like Ms. Stillman has worked hard to get to where she is. So people should hesitate to suggest her success is not deserved. But not everyone can get into the Georgetown Day School in Washington DC, which is one of the most exclusive in its admission policies. And Sarah Stillman is a significant name in the Rockefeller family, belonging first to Sarah Elizabeth "Elsie" Stillman (1872-1935), one of the two daughters of James J. Stillman, CEO and Chairman of National City Bank. Stillman was an ally of the Rockefeller brothers of Standard Oil. Elsie Stillman married William G. Rockefeller and her younger sister Isabel married Percy A. Rockefeller. Both were sons of Standard Oil founder William Rockefeller. Another famous Elsie Stillman Rockefeller, named in honor of her grandmother, was killed by her husband in a 1982 murder-suicide. So it might have made sense, around 1984, to name a daughter Sarah Stillman (perhaps after the same person, but this time a great grandmother?) rather than Elsie Stillman. It's just a speculation and almost certainly a coincidence. Stillman isn't that unique of a surname, after all. There are about 8,000 people with that surname in America today and according to GROK, Ancestry.com records 75 distinct Stillman families in the US in 1840. And the Rockefeller family tree is complicated; I don't really have enough energy or interest to pursue this and find all the Rockefeller extended family members who were having kids in the 1980s.

It is odd to me, though, imagining the lives of people who might be related to "big names" of American history. And even if this journalist isn't related to the elite Stillmans, there are some interesting implications of the different educational opportunities that people have had access to, indifferent times and places in American history. And while I was poking around, I noticed that the murdered Elsie Stillman Rockefeller's mother was a woman named Florence Lincoln. She was distantly related to President Lincoln and to Paul Revere. After her marriage to William A. Rockefeller III ended in 1929, she married George Sloan, son of Irish immigrant and railroad magnate Samuel Sloan. It interests me quite a bit, how these family ties were formed by elite intermarriage. But it's hard work ferreting out the details and GROK can't always be trusted. For a while it was telling me that Florence Lincoln had married James Stillman Rockefeller after divorcing William. This was quite unhelpful and I might not have caught the error, except that I already knew she had married Sloan.