Public Family Trees/Rockefeller/Sharon Percy
Born 1944 · Female · Chicago, Illinois, United States
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Sharon Percy
b. 1944
Sharon Percy Rockefeller is an American public broadcasting executive and the wife of Senator Jay Rockefeller. Born in 1944, she is a daughter of Charles H. Percy, the United States Senator from Illinois, and graduated from Stanford University. She married Jay Rockefeller in 1967 and served as First Lady of West Virginia during his two terms as governor. A member of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting board from…
Born1944
The beginning of Sharon Percy's recorded life.
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A partnership that connects two branches of the Rockefeller family.
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Gen 1 · 1810 - 1906
William Avery Rockefeller was an American traveling salesman and the father of the Rockefeller dynasty. Born in Granger, New York, in 1810, he married Eliza Davison in 1837 and the couple raised six children in Richford, Moravia and Owego in upstate New York before the family moved to Strongsville, Ohio, near Cleveland. He sold patent remedies and traded goods across the countryside and was away from home for long stretches, leaving the household largely to his wife. His son John D. Rockefeller later said his father had trained him in bargaining and bookkeeping from boyhood. Two of his sons, John D. Rockefeller and William Rockefeller, went on to found the Standard Oil Company.
Gen 2 · 1839 - 1937
John Davison Rockefeller was an American industrialist and philanthropist who founded the Standard Oil Company and became the defining business figure of the Gilded Age. Born in Richford, New York, to William Avery Rockefeller and Eliza Davison, he moved with his family to Ohio as a teenager, worked as a bookkeeper in Cleveland and entered oil refining in 1863. He incorporated Standard Oil in 1870 with his brother William and partners including Henry Flagler, and built it into a near total monopoly on American refining until the Supreme Court ordered its breakup in 1911. With his wife Laura Spelman he raised four children who reached adulthood. In retirement he gave away much of his fortune, founding the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Gen 2 · 1841 - 1922
William Rockefeller was an American businessman and financier and a co-founder of the Standard Oil Company. The younger brother of John D. Rockefeller, he was born in Richford, New York, in 1841 and grew up in Ohio, entering the oil trade alongside his brother and taking charge of Standard Oil's New York office and its export business from 1866. He became one of the most prominent financiers of his era, with major interests in Anaconda Copper, the National City Bank of New York and several railroads. He married Almira Geraldine Goodsell, and their children included Percy Avery Rockefeller and the philanthropist Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge. His country estate, Rockwood Hall, stood near Tarrytown, New York.
Gen 2 · 1845 - 1917
Franklin Rockefeller, generally known as Frank, was an American businessman and the youngest brother of John D. and William Rockefeller. Born in upstate New York in 1845 and raised in Ohio, he served in the Union Army during the American Civil War and afterward went into business in Cleveland, holding interests in iron and steel concerns and in Standard Oil. He later ran a large cattle ranch in Kansas and was active in the livestock trade. His relationship with his eldest brother was strained for much of his adult life, and the two were often at odds over business matters, a division that was widely reported at the time.
Gen 3 · 1872 - 1932
Edith Rockefeller McCormick was an American arts patron and analytical psychologist and the youngest daughter of John D. Rockefeller. Born in Cleveland in 1872, she married Harold Fowler McCormick, heir to the McCormick harvesting machine fortune, in 1895, and became one of the leading figures of Chicago society, presiding over the Villa Turicum estate at Lake Forest. She was the principal financial backer of the Chicago Grand Opera and later the Chicago Civic Opera. From 1913 she spent eight years in Zurich studying with Carl Jung, helped fund the publication of his work in English and returned to Chicago to practice as an analyst herself. Her son Fowler McCormick later led International Harvester.
Gen 3 · 1874 - 1960
John Davison Rockefeller Jr. was an American philanthropist and the only son of John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Rockefeller. Born in Cleveland in 1874 and educated at Brown University, he joined his father's office in 1897 and from about 1910 devoted himself entirely to giving the family fortune away. He married Abby Greene Aldrich, daughter of Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, in 1901, and they had six children. He financed and built Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, restored Colonial Williamsburg, built Riverside Church and the Cloisters, donated the land for the United Nations headquarters in New York and gave extensive acreage to Acadia, Grand Teton and other national parks. After Abby's death he married Martha Baird Allen in 1951.
Gen 3 · 1878 - 1934
Percy Avery Rockefeller was an American financier, the younger son of Standard Oil co-founder William Rockefeller and a nephew of John D. Rockefeller. Born in New York in 1878, he graduated from Yale, where he was a member of Skull and Bones, and became a director of a long list of corporations including Remington Arms, the Brown Brothers banking house, Bethlehem Steel and several Standard Oil successor companies. He married Isabel Stillman, daughter of the banker James Stillman, in 1901, and lived at Owenoke Farm in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was an active yachtsman and thoroughbred owner and remained one of the leading figures of the second Rockefeller generation on Wall Street.
Gen 4 · 1908 - 1979
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was an American politician, businessman and art collector who served as the 41st Vice President of the United States. Born in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1908, the second son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, he was named for his maternal grandfather, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich. He worked on Rockefeller Center, served as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and then Assistant Secretary of State under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, and was elected Governor of New York in 1958, holding the office for four terms until 1973. He sought the Republican presidential nomination three times and was appointed Vice President by Gerald Ford in 1974. A lifelong patron of modern and Latin American art, he was president of the Museum of Modern Art.
Gen 4 · 1910 - 2004
Laurance Spelman Rockefeller was an American venture capitalist and conservationist, the third son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. Born in New York in 1910 and educated at Princeton, he became one of the earliest American venture investors, backing Eastern Air Lines, McDonnell Aircraft and later Intel and Apple among many others. He was equally known for conservation: he developed the Rockresorts hotels, including Caneel Bay, gave the land that created Virgin Islands National Park, chaired the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission under President Eisenhower and advised several presidents on conservation and the environment. He married Mary French in 1934 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.
Gen 4 · 1912 - 1973
Winthrop Rockefeller was an American businessman, rancher and politician who served as the 37th Governor of Arkansas. Born in New York in 1912, the fourth son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, he worked in the Texas oil fields as a young man and enlisted in the United States Army in 1941, serving through the Pacific campaign and rising to lieutenant colonel. In 1953 he moved to Arkansas and built Winrock Farms on Petit Jean Mountain, becoming a noted breeder of Santa Gertrudis cattle and chairman of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. Elected governor in 1966, he was the first Republican to hold the office since Reconstruction and served two terms, pressing prison and civil service reform.
Gen 5 · 1932 - 2000
Rodman Clark Rockefeller was an American businessman and the eldest son of Nelson Rockefeller and Mary Todhunter Clark Rockefeller. Born in 1932 and educated at Princeton and Columbia Business School, he spent most of his career at the International Basic Economy Corporation, the development company his father founded in 1947 to invest in agriculture, housing and food distribution in Latin America, serving as its president and then chairman. He was also chairman of the Council of the Americas and a longtime advocate of private investment as a tool of Latin American development. He was a brother of Steven Clark Rockefeller and of Michael Rockefeller, and a trustee of Rockefeller family philanthropies.
The Belgian royal family, formally the House of Belgium and dynastically a branch of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, is the reigning family of Belgium, founded when the German prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld accepted the throne of the newly independent kingdom in 1831 and continuing today through King Philippe and his heir, Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant. Belgium became independent from the Netherlands in 1830 and chose a constitutional monarchy. Its National Congress looked abroad for a sovereign who could balance French and British interests, and settled on Leopold, a widowed, well-connected and famously cautious prince who had already turned down the crown of Greece. He took the constitutional oath on 21 July 1831, still the Belgian national day. Seven monarchs have reigned since: Leopold I, Leopold II, Albert I, Leopold III, Baudouin, Albert II and Philippe. ## Origins The dynasty's roots are in the small Thuringian duchy of Saxe-Coburg, whose princes married into half the thrones of nineteenth-century Europe. Leopold I was the uncle of both Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, and his second marriage, to Louise-Marie of Orleans, daughter of the French king Louis Philippe I, tied the new kingdom to Paris as well as London. The crown did not pass in a straight line: Leopold II's only son died at the age of nine, so the succession moved to Leopold II's brother Philippe, Count of Flanders, and then to Philippe's son, Albert I. Every Belgian monarch since 1909 descends from that collateral branch. ## Notable members Leopold II is the most studied and most criticised figure in the family, remembered for the industrial boom and monumental building of his reign and, above all, for his personal rule over the Congo Free State. Albert I and Queen Elisabeth of Bavaria became wartime symbols of Belgian resistance behind the Yser in 1914. Leopold III's surrender in 1940 and his conduct under occupation triggered the political crisis known as the Royal Question and ended in his abdication. Baudouin reigned for 42 years and presided over Congolese independence and Belgium's transformation into a federal state. Daughters of the house carried its blood outward: Charlotte became Empress Carlota of Mexico, Marie-Jose was the last Queen of Italy, and Josephine-Charlotte was Grand Duchess of Luxembourg. ## Significance In a country divided by language, the monarchy has been the one institution claimed by both Flemish and Walloon Belgians, and the king's role in brokering coalition governments remains politically real rather than ceremonial. The family has also changed with the country: equal succession was introduced in 1991, making Princess Elisabeth the first female Duchess of Brabant and the future first queen regnant of the Belgians, and in 2020 a court recognised Delphine of Saxe-Coburg as a daughter of Albert II. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Dynasty | House of Belgium (Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) | | Country | Kingdom of Belgium | | Founder | Leopold I, King of the Belgians (1790-1865) | | Reigning since | 21 July 1831 | | Monarchs to date | Seven, from Leopold I to Philippe | | Current head | King Philippe (born 1960), reigning since 2013 | | Heir apparent | Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant (born 2001) | | Principal residences | Royal Palace of Brussels, Castle of Laeken | | Motto | L'union fait la force / Eendracht maakt macht |
The House of Tudor was the royal family that ruled England and Wales from 1485 to 1603, founded by Henry VII after his victory at Bosworth Field and ending with the death of his granddaughter Elizabeth I. In five reigns the dynasty took England out of the Roman Catholic church, made the monarch the head of a national religion, and turned a peripheral kingdom into a naval and literary power. This tree follows the line from the Welsh courtier Owen Tudor and the dowager queen Catherine of Valois down to Elizabeth I, together with the Brandon, Grey and Clifford cousins and the Scottish line that ended in James VI and I. ## Origins The family name comes from Penmynydd in Anglesey, north Wales, where the Tudors were landed gentry in the service of the princes of Gwynedd. Owen Tudor came to the English court in the 1420s and married Catherine of Valois, the widow of Henry V. Their sons Edmund and Jasper Tudor were half-brothers of Henry VI, who raised them to earldoms in 1452. Edmund's marriage to Lady Margaret Beaufort, a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, added the senior Lancastrian claim to the throne, and their only child, born after his father's death, became Henry VII. His marriage to Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV, joined the two houses whose rivalry had driven the Wars of the Roses and gave the dynasty its red and white rose. ## Notable members Henry VII rebuilt the crown's finances and secured the new dynasty through marriage alliances with Spain and Scotland. Henry VIII married six times and broke with Rome, and his three surviving children each reigned in turn: Edward VI as a Protestant boy king, Mary I as the first queen to rule England in her own right, and Elizabeth I for forty-four years. Around them stand the cousins who carried royal blood without the crown, among them Lady Jane Grey, queen for nine days, her sisters Catherine and Mary Grey, and Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, one of the last Plantagenets. ## The Scottish and Suffolk lines Henry VII's daughters carried the blood outward. Margaret Tudor married James IV of Scotland, and her line runs through James V and Mary, Queen of Scots, to James VI and I, who inherited England in 1603. Mary Tudor married Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, and their daughters Frances and Eleanor Brandon produced the Grey and Clifford claimants whom Henry VIII's will preferred over the Scottish descendants of his elder sister. ## Significance No English dynasty changed the country more in so few generations. The Tudors created the Church of England, absorbed the wealth of the monasteries into the crown, brought Wales formally into the English legal and parliamentary system, and built the navy that met the Spanish Armada. The Elizabethan settlement shaped English religion for centuries, and the Elizabethan decades produced Shakespeare, Spenser and the first English voyages to the Americas. When Elizabeth I died unmarried in 1603, the throne passed peacefully to her Scottish cousin, and the two crowns were joined in one person for the first time. | Fact | Details | |---|---| | Origin | Penmynydd, Anglesey, Wales | | Ruled | England, Wales and Ireland, 1485 to 1603 | | Founder | Owen Tudor, through his son Edmund Tudor | | Monarchs | Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I | | Emblem | The Tudor rose, red and white combined | | Principal seats | Richmond, Greenwich, Hampton Court and Whitehall palaces | | Ended | Death of Elizabeth I in 1603, succeeded by James VI of Scotland |
The Kennedy family is an Irish American political dynasty from Boston, Massachusetts, whose members have included the 35th President of the United States, three United States senators, four congressmen, several ambassadors, and the founders of the Peace Corps and the Special Olympics. Across four documented generations the family moved from a County Wexford farm to the White House, and its name became shorthand in American public life for both political ambition and public service. ## Origins The American line begins with Patrick Kennedy, a farmer's son from Dunganstown, near New Ross in County Wexford, who emigrated to East Boston during the Great Famine. His son, Patrick Joseph "P. J." Kennedy (1858 to 1929), built a livelihood in the liquor and banking trades and served in both houses of the Massachusetts legislature, becoming one of the Democratic ward leaders who ran the city's Irish Catholic politics. On the other side stood John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald (1863 to 1950), congressman and twice Mayor of Boston. The two families joined in 1914 when P. J.'s son Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. married Honey Fitz's daughter Rose Fitzgerald. Their nine children, raised between Brookline, Bronxville and the compound at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, form the generation the world knows. ## Notable members John F. Kennedy served as President from 1961 until his death in 1963, having previously represented Massachusetts in the House and Senate. His brother Robert F. Kennedy was Attorney General, then Senator from New York, and a candidate for the presidency in 1968. Their youngest brother Edward "Ted" Kennedy sat in the United States Senate for almost 47 years and was one of the most productive legislators of his era. The eldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., was a naval aviator killed on a volunteer mission in 1944. Away from elected office, Eunice Kennedy Shriver founded the Special Olympics, her husband Sargent Shriver created the Peace Corps and Head Start, and Jean Kennedy Smith founded the arts and disability organisation VSA before serving as United States Ambassador to Ireland. The following generations have produced congressmen, a lieutenant governor, ambassadors, documentary filmmakers, human rights advocates and journalists. ## Significance No other American family has combined electoral success, philanthropy and public visibility on this scale for so long. The Kennedys shaped the civil rights era, the space programme, immigration reform, health care legislation and the modern understanding of disability rights, and their private losses were mourned publicly in a way usually reserved for royalty. The Kennedy Library in Boston, the Kennedy Center in Washington and dozens of schools and institutions carry the name. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Family name | Kennedy | | Irish origin | Dunganstown, County Wexford, Ireland | | American home | Boston and Hyannis Port, Massachusetts | | Founding couple | Patrick Joseph Kennedy and Mary Augusta Hickey | | Best known member | John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States | | Generations covered | Four | | Offices held | Presidency, US Senate, US House, ambassadorships, state office | | Institutions founded | Peace Corps, Special Olympics, Best Buddies, Citizens Energy |
Sharon Percy married John Davison Rockefeller IV.
Sharon Percy is recorded as Public broadcasting executive in the Rockefeller family tree.
Sharon Percy's recorded native place is Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Sharon Percy is recorded as John Davison Rockefeller's 4 steps away.
Sharon Percy is recorded in the Rockefeller family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 42 other people.
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