Who really discovered America, a president's four stepmoms, gunfights at the San Francisco City Hall

The Dancestors Genealogy Newsletter provides a diverse collection of historical narratives and genealogical insights ranging from medieval Europe to modern American history. One featured story explores the theory that Christopher Columbus was actually a Spanish nobleman named Pedro Madruga, citing genetic evidence and linguistic similarities. The publication also tracks the Stradling family in Wales, detailing their 12th-century castle and a harrowing kidnapping by pirates. Personal family research is highlighted through the discovery of Harriet Bowers’ true parentage and the tragic account of a 19th-century gunfight at San Francisco’s City Hall. Additionally, the text examines the complex personal life of William Jefferson Blythe Jr., the biological father of President Bill Clinton. The newsletter concludes by showcasing Civil War diaries donated to a university library and encouraging readers to formally preserve their own ancestral legacies.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You know, when you look at an old family portrait, there's this uh this expectation of permanence.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Right, yeah. Like it's set in stone.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Exactly. The poses are stiff, the smiles are literally painted on. You look at that canvas and you just assume, well, that's exactly who those people were.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Because it's a finalized image. I mean, the paint has dried, the historical record is set, and we just accept it as fact.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

But what if you could take a solvent to that canvas? Like just wipe away that top layer of oil paint. Suddenly you find a completely different face underneath, an entirely different reality. What if everything you thought you knew about your family tree or even, you know, major world history was just a meticulously crafted cover story?

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Aaron Powell It's an unsettling thought, honestly. We like to think of history as concrete, but as we're going to explore today, the official record is rarely the whole truth.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

So welcome to the deep dive. You know, I was reading through a stack of sources today, specifically the freshly published May 2nd, 2026 edition of the Dancesters Genealogy newsletter, and it really got me thinking about that painted portrait.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

Yeah, that newsletter's packed this week.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

It really is. So our mission today is to take a solvent to history. We're pulling out the wildest, most surprising hidden lives buried in these genealogical records. I mean, we are talking 15th century conspiracies, secret presidential families, and proof that human nature, with all of its very messy secrets, hasn't changed one bit over the centuries.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

And we're going to see how some of the most monumental moments in history actually pivot on very personal deceptions. I mean, the first story in this newsletter completely rewrites a chapter of history we all thought was settled in, well, grade school.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Oh, it really does. We are going way back to the 1400s to look at a man named Pedro Alvarez de Sutamaor. He was better known as Pedro Madruga. Right. Now Pedro was the illegitimate son of Spanish nobility, and normally, you know, that means you get nothing. When his father died, the estates went to the legitimate son, Alvaro.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

As was the custom.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Right. But when Alvaro died unmarried, the family actually made a provision to let Pedro inherit. He was legitimized by the sovereigns of Castile and Portugal, married into a noble Portuguese family, and became a massive political player.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

He was a serious military force too. I mean, to give you some context, during the 1460s, there was this massive peasant uprising in Galicia known as the Irmandinho Revolt.

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Which was huge, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Yeah. Basically the lower classes were tearing down the castles of the nobility, and Pedro actually raised an army at the request of the nobles, stepped right into the chaos, and completely subdued the rebellion. He wasn't just some nobleman, he was a fiercely capable tactician.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

And he had a fantastic nickname, uh Madruga, which translates to early riser, and the legend behind how he got this name is just great.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

It's so telling of his personality.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

It really is. So he had a land dispute with a rival, the Count of Rubidavia. They agreed to a very traditional medieval settlement. Basically, they would both wake up at the first cockroof of the morning, get on their horses, and ride toward each other's territories. And wherever they met on the road would be the new official boundary line. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

A classic gentleman's agreement for the era.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

Exactly. Except Pedro didn't want to wait for dawn. He just arbitrarily declared that the first cockrow actually happens at midnight.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Of course he did.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

He got on his horse and rode through the entire night. When his rival finally stepped out of his castle at dawn, Pedro was already standing right there at his front door.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Which tells you exactly who this man was. He was clever, highly ambitious, and perfectly willing to exploit loopholes to completely dominate his opponents.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

Okay, let's untack this. Because bending the rules of a land dispute doesn't even begin to cover what modern historians think he did next. The twist here is a modern theory proposing that Pedro Madruga didn't actually die in 1486, as the official records claim.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

Right.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Instead, he faked his death and assumed a completely new identity to disguise a secret pact with his former enemies, the Catholic monarchs, and the identity he supposedly took on. Christopher Columbus.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

I mean, it sounds like a historical thriller, but the evidence researchers are compiling is genuinely compelling. Like when Columbus went to the West Indies, he named over a hundred coastal features.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

And he didn't just pick random names, he named them after very specific localities in the Pontavedra estuary, which happens to be right near Pseudomayor in Galicia, which is Pedro Madruga's ancestral home.

SPEAKER_00 4:29

Which is an incredibly specific geographic fingerprint to leave behind.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Exactly. Add to that, handwriting experts have pointed out striking undeniable similarities between Columbus's crypt and Pedro Madruga's surviving letters.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

Yeah. And perhaps most importantly, a recent genetic study of Columbus's DNA is actually supporting this Galician origin theory. It's completely upending the traditional narrative that he was a weaver from Genoa, Italy.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

But wait, I have to push back on this. The newsletter mentions a massive piece of counter evidence. There's a will drafted in 1491 by Pedro's eldest son Alvaro.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

That's true, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

And in this legal document, Alvaro explicitly stipulates that his parents' bones be moved and interred in a specific cathedral chapel. So doesn't a legal document orchestrating the transfer of his physical skeleton completely sink this Columbus theory?

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Aaron Ross Powell What's fascinating here is that history is often a negotiated narrative.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

A will is a legal instrument, yes, but it is also a very public declaration.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Okay, I see where you're going.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

Right. Like if you're trying to convince the rival factions of 15th century Europe that a powerful, dangerous man is truly dead, orchestrating a highly public, ceremonial transfer of his supposed bones is exactly how you'd cement the lie.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

That is the perfect cover-up.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

It is. And what we're seeing now is that modern science, like DNA analysis, allows us to look past the official ink of these old treaties and wills. It forces us to question the foundational origins of historical giants.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

And there is a modern footnote to this that just blew my mind. If this Galician theory holds up, genealogists are pointing out a massive historical butterfly effect.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

Oh, the Puerto Rico connection.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

Yes. Think about the most famous modern Sotomayor, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is of Puerto Rican descent. Well, Pedro Madruga's son, Crystal Ball, actually became an early colonial governor of Puerto Rico. Meaning a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice might actually be a direct descendant of Christopher Columbus.

SPEAKER_01 6:31

It's staggering to think about. It shows how these distant 500-year-old historical riddles can suddenly reach out and rewrite the identity of figures in the present day. But you know, we don't even have to look back to the 1400s to find men living hidden multiple lives.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

No, we really don't. Sometimes the most shocking secrets belong to the parents of modern world leaders.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

And these modern secrets weren't enabled by royal packs or fake boxes of bones. They were enabled by the vast, unmonitored anonymity of the American highway.

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Here's where it gets really interesting. The newsletter jumps to the 1930s and 40s to look at a traveling heavy equipment salesman named William Jefferson Blythe Jr.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

Oh, this guy.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

I was trying to map out this guy's life, and I honestly got lost. I need to walk through this timeline because it's just absurd. Okay, so December 1935, he marries Virginia Adele Gash. They divorced 13 months later. But then, eighteen months after the divorce, they have a son together, Henry Leon.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

A bit messy, but you know, not entirely outside the realm of normal human relationships.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Sure, but then he just accelerates. August 1938, he marries Maxine Hamilton. They divorced two weeks later. Two weeks? Two weeks. Fast forward to December 1940, he marries Minnie Fay Gash. Wait, that is his first wife's sister?

SPEAKER_01 7:46

The audacity of that alone is remarkable.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

Right. And that gets annulled four months later. Then, a mere eight days after that annulment, in May 1941, he marries Juanetta Ellen Alexander. And just eight days after that wedding, she gives birth to their daughter.

SPEAKER_01 8:01

When you look at the mechanics of this, you have to think of geography as the equivalent of modern-day burner phones.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

Oh, that's a great comparison.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

Yeah, I mean, today people use untraceable digital accounts to hide their tracks. In the 1930s, Blythe used the life of a traveling salesman.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

And it gets even more complex. He's still legally married to Winetta until April 1944, but seven months before that divorce is finalized, in September 1943, he commits straight-up bigamy and marries his fifth wife, Virginia Del Cassidy. Wow. And shortly after, Blythe ships out for World War II, serving as a motor pool mechanic in Egypt and Italy. He comes back from the war, buys a house in Chicago, and seems completely ready to settle down with his fifth wife.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

If we connect this to the bigger picture, the compartmentalization is almost sociopathic. None of these women had any idea the others existed, because without digitized records or social media or centralized marriage databases, stepping across a state line meant you could literally become a new person. The distance was the cover story.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

But the cover story ends tragically. In May 1946, he's driving his 42 Buick from Chicago to Hope, Arkansas. A tire blows out on U.S. Route 60 near Sykeston, Missouri. He's thrown from the car, actually survives the violent crash itself, but ends up drowning in just four feet of water in a drainage ditch.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Just a sudden abrupt end.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Yeah. And three months after he dies, his widow, Virginia, gives birth to their son, William Jefferson Blythe III.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

And that son, of course, later takes his stepfather's name and grows up to be the 42nd president of the United States, Bill Clinton.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

Which is just wild. Bill Clinton's mother had absolutely no idea about the previous four marriages. Not at all. It wasn't until a massive Washington Post investigation in 1992 and 1993, which is well into Clinton's presidency, that national journalists digging through Dusty County birth and marriage registries finally connected the dots.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

Unbelievable.

SPEAKER_00 9:56

Even his first son, Henry Leon, who had changed his last name and was quietly running a janitorial business out in California, he had no idea he was the half-brother of the president of the United States until that campaign coverage broke.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

It's a perfect illustration of how journalism and genealogical record keeping eventually dismantled the secrets that distance used to hide so easily. The truth catches up, even if it takes 50 years.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

But you know, while the Blythe family secrets ended up splashed across the front pages of national newspapers, Harriet's story in this newsletter reminds us that everyday family secrets are often hidden in literal cardboard boxes, just waiting for someone to open them.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

Harriet's story is about the secrets we bury just to survive. It's much quieter, but deeply heartbreaking.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

So the newsletter author was researching his ancestor, Harriet Bowers. If you just look at the 1850 and 1860 census records, it looks incredibly straightforward. She's listed in a house with Samuel and Judith Bowers. Now, for anyone who hasn't looked at an 1850 census, they didn't have a column that explained how everyone was related. Right. They just listed the names of the people living under the roof. So naturally, you'd look at that document and assume Harriet is Samuel and Judith's daughter.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

Which is exactly how historical data can lie to you by omission.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Entirely. The truth only came to light because a relative's great uncle had an old box of property deeds from Gloucester County, New Jersey, sitting in his attic. The author actually paid the great uncle $100 for this box. I want you to imagine that. Handing over a hundred dollar bill and buying the absolute truth about your own ancestors, completely rewriting your family tree in an afternoon.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

And what was inside that box dismantled the entire census narrative.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

It completely tore it apart. The deeds proved Harriet wasn't Samuel's daughter at all. She was the daughter of Samuel's brother, George, and his wife Rachel. George passes away, and Rachel marries a waterman named Abraham Cowgill. It becomes this massive, complex, blended family.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Because of the kids from both sides?

SPEAKER_00 11:56

Right. Between previous marriages and the kids they had together, there were 17 children in total. But for some unexplained reason, by 1850, Harriet and her two blood sisters were farmed out to live in other people's households, including Samuel's.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

They were effectively exiled from their own family unit.

SPEAKER_00 12:12

And it followed her for life. When her stepfather Abraham died in 1892, Harriet was completely excluded from the inheritance. She was even missing from the Big Cowgill family reunion in 1909. That's harsh. What makes it so pointed is that another non-blood sister, Catherine, was included in the inheritance and the reunion. Harriet was specifically intentionally alienated, but the tragedy really compounds later in her life. Harriet ends up suffering terribly under an abusive husband, but she absolutely refuses to report it to the authorities or seek a legal separation.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

And the reason she stayed silent is the most damning part of the story.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

She was collecting a Civil War widow's pension from her first husband. If she officially acknowledged her abusive second marriage on the legal record, she would lose her pension. She chose to endure domestic abuse and silence purely for financial survival.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

This is exactly why genealogy is so vital. I mean, the census gives you the what, right, the sterile data of who physically occupied a house on a specific Tuesday in 1850. But personal deeds, attic boxes, and pension records provide the how and the why.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

Yeah, the real human story.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Exactly. Harriet's silence exposes the incredibly harsh economic realities for women in the 19th century. She wasn't just a name on a ledger, her entire existence was a calculated negotiation for basic survival.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

She was trapped by the paperwork of her era.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

She was. But while Harriet's life was shaped by these quiet, protracted struggles, not all secrets stay buried. Sometimes, as the newsletter explores next, they literally explode onto the streets.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

That's right. The newsletter shifts from the quiet desperation of New Jersey to sudden extreme violence in 1881 San Francisco. We're introduced to a man named Thomas W. Cunningham. Now, Thomas wasn't a gunslinger, he was a wholesale commission merchant.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

Right. And for context, a commission merchant is essentially a middleman who sells bulk goods on behalf of someone else for a percentage. This is a guy who works at a desk dealing with contracts and ledgers.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

Exactly, a white-collar guy.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

But Thomas gets into a bitter, escalating dispute with his brother-in-law, John A. Chandler, because Chandler was abusing Thomas' sister-in-law. The argument reaches a boiling point and it ends in a literal quick draw gunfight right in front of the old city hall in San Francisco. Thomas drew his weapon first, but Chandler was faster. Thomas was killed right there on the steps of a major civic building.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

It completely shatters the Hollywood stereotype we have of the era.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

It really does. We always picture the Wild West as these dusty, remote frontier towns with tumbleweeds blowing past a saloon. But here is a deadly shootout happening in the middle of a booming metropolis right at the seat of city government. Yeah. And to put it in perspective, this happened six months before the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

Violence wasn't just rural, it was intensely urban, and it was often deeply personal. But this sudden trauma isn't unique to the American West. The newsletter traces this thread of violent disruption all the way back to the Stradling family of St. Donut's Castle in Wales.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

Which is this imposing fortress perched on the cliffs overlooking the Bristol Channel.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Right. And back in 1449, Henry Stradling was crossing that channel with his family when their ship was intercepted by a notorious Breton pirate named Colin Dolphin.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Just bad luck.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Very bad luck. The family was dragged off to Saint Malo and held for an astronomical ransom of a thousand marks. To pay it, the Stradlings had to sell off multiple manors and clear-cut vast quantities of their forests. It financially devastated them.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 15:46

Henry eventually died in Cyprus on his way back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And centuries later, the family's grip on the castle permanently ended when Sir Thomas Stradling died in a duel in 1738.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

So what does this all mean? The detail about the Stradlings that I couldn't get over was what they did with the bones. The newsletter cites these elaborate tomb inscriptions from 1536 and 1573. It turns out this family spent decades digging up and moving the bones of their ancestors back and forth between the church chancel and the private chapel. So strange. I'm sorry, but they were treating their ancestors' remains like living room furniture, they just couldn't quite figure out how to arrange.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

This raises an important question, though. It sounds absurd to us, but it asks something profound about human nature. How do we memorialize sudden trauma? Think about the contrast here. You have the straddlings etching these massive, lengthy tomb inscriptions, detailing every night, every pirate ransom, and every ceremonial relocation of bones, and then you have the blunt, violent two-sentence reality of a police report from 1880s San Francisco. They look different, but they are both desperate attempts to force order onto a sudden, chaotic end.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

That is such a fascinating way to look at it, because whether you're hauling bones around a 16th-century Welsh chapel or filing a police blotter in California, or even sitting completely still for a painted family portrait, human beings are desperate to leave a permanent mark.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

We want to be remembered.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

We want to prove we were here. So how do we actually safeguard these fragile stories today?

SPEAKER_01 17:19

Well, the newsletter author provides a perfect tangible example of this from his own life. He had inherited his great-great-grandfather's Civil War diaries.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

And it wasn't just one book, there were three of them. There was a small one he carried in his pocket during the actual war, a large one he wrote in after he returned home, and a medium one covering periods of his entire life.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

And instead of letting them rot in an attic box, he took action. He donated them to the U.S. Grant Collection at Mississippi State University's Mitchell Memorial Library. And when he recently went back to check on them, he saw exactly how preservation works. They were housed in specialized Gaylord archival boxes.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

I actually had to look up what makes those boxes so special because they sound like a brand placement. But it's actually fascinating science. These boxes are made from lignin-free, acid-free materials. They are buffered to resist humidity, and they completely block out UV light.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

They basically create a microclimate that stops the chemical breakdown of the paper.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Exactly. It freezes the artifact in time. I mean, genealogy isn't just a backward-looking hobby. It's a forward-looking act of curation. The library is a fortress of memory. They also house the massive Frank and Virginia Williams collection of Lincoln Ianna. Yeah, the author mentions a specific piece in that collection that really stuck with me. It's a sculpture called Moody Tearful Night. It's in their assassination exhibit, and it's designed to capture the raw, devastating emotion of the nation right after Lincoln was shot, just sitting in a climate-controlled room, preserving that exact moment of historical grief.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

They also have the Charles H. Templeton Music Museum preserving over 200 self-playing instruments and tens of thousands of pieces of sheet music. The author sums up the importance of all this with a very blunt observation: Paper gets thrown in the trash, books survive.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Paper gets thrown in the trash, books survive. That hits hard. We've talked about so many physical objects today. Three leather-bound Civil War diaries, a hundred dollar cardboard box of property deeds hiding in a New Jersey attic, heavy stone inscriptions in a Welsh church. Yep. All of these physical things survived centuries of weather and neglect to reveal these hidden lives to us today.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

But stepping back, it begs a chilling question for everyone listening right now. What happens to our secrets today?

SPEAKER_00 19:30

That is the terrifying part, isn't it? Our most intimate thoughts aren't written in a leather-bound diary that you can put in a Gay Lord archival box. They're locked in text messages. Right. Our memories aren't painted portraits. They're digital photos sitting on a cloud server somewhere. The evidence of our lives, our correspondence, our geography, it's all digital. It lacks physical form.

SPEAKER_01 19:52

So in 200 years, what will a genealogist actually find? Will there be an archival box of our digital lives to dig through? Or is the 21st century going to become a genealogical black hole where everything we were, every secret we kept is just wiped during a server migration?

SPEAKER_00 20:09

It makes you rethink that painted portrait from the beginning. At least they had a canvas. Are we painting a digital portrait of ourselves that's going to evaporate completely, leaving no canvas at all for our descendants to discover? I want you to really think about what physical legacy, what tangible proof of your life you are leaving behind for someone to find in an attic a hundred years from now. Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive, and we'll catch you next time.