The American Presidents Series About the book The Roosevelts
were an old Dutch family who immigrated to Manhattan in the
seventeenth century and prospered there. In a photograph of
Lincoln's New York funeral procession there can be seen the
mansion of Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, one of the city's
ten millionaires with a fortune based in real estate and
merchandising plate glass. Watching from one of the windows are
two little boys, believed to be Cornelius's grandsons, Theodore
Roosevelt Jr. and Elliott. Their father, Theodore Sr., lived
more modestly in a brownstone on East Twentieth Street, where
Theodore Jr., the future president, was born in 1858. He had
been preceded by a sister, Anna, nicknamed Bamie, who in middle
age married a naval officer, W Sheffield Cowles, and was
followed by another sister, Corinne, who wed the wealthy Douglas
Robinson, and a younger brother, Elliott. The sisters, brilliant
and admirable women, were lifelong devotees of their brother
Theodore, but Elliott, despite good look