The John Tyler family tree, from two marriages to grandsons alive in the 2000s

John Tyler was born on 29 March 1790 at Greenway in Charles City County, Virginia, the son of John Tyler Sr. and Mary Armistead. He was governor of Virginia from 1825 to 1827 and became President in 1841, when William Henry Harrison died a month into his term.^5,4 He died in Richmond on 18 January 1862.⁵

The Miller Center describes a man born into money who married into it twice and was still shadowed by debt. Fourteen children, as the Center counts them, meant a constant stream of bills for schooling, medicine and weddings.³ He owned about seventy enslaved people, and his second wife defended slavery in print.^3,2

Letitia Christian was born on a Tidewater plantation on 12 November 1790, the daughter of Mary and Colonel Robert Christian. She married John Tyler on 29 March 1813, his twenty-third birthday, and kept the household while he served in Congress and as governor.¹

By 1841 a paralytic stroke had confined her to a chair, so her daughter-in-law Priscilla Cooper Tyler, the wife of Robert, acted as hostess of the White House. Letitia made her one public appearance there at the wedding of her daughter Elizabeth to William N. Waller in 1842.¹ She died of a stroke in the White House in September 1842.⁵

Julia Gardiner was born in 1820 on Gardiner's Island, New York, the daughter of David and Juliana Gardiner, and was thirty years younger than Tyler. On 28 February 1844 a gun exploded on the warship USS Princeton during a cruise on the Potomac and killed six people, her father among them. She then accepted Tyler, and they married in New York on 26 June 1844.²

Julia was First Lady for the last eight months of the term. From 1845 the couple lived at Sherwood Forest in Charles City County, where they raised their seven children. She died in Richmond on 10 July 1889.²

Lyon Gardiner Tyler, the fourth son of Julia, was born at Sherwood Forest in 1853 and was president of the College of William & Mary from 1888 to 1919. After his first wife died in 1921 he married Sue Ruffin. Their sons were Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr., born in 1925, and Harrison Ruffin Tyler, born in 1928, and a third son died in infancy.⁶

Both grandsons are drawn with names and years only. Lyon Jr. died in 2020.⁶ Harrison, a chemical engineer, preserved Sherwood Forest and Fort Pocahontas, and NPR reported his death at ninety-six in May 2025, three generations from a President born in 1790.⁴ That closes the John Tyler family tree 235 years after its head was born.⁵