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That is correct Randomparent except for the fact that Frederick Rike McConnaughey,my husband was born in 1941 not 1942. He is still with us and enjoying your commentary very much.
That is correct Randomparent except for the fact that Frederick Rike McConnaughey,my husband was born in 1941 not 1942. He is still with us and enjoying your commentary very much.
If he has any other corrections or stories to tell, please tell him to chime on in! I've pieced most of this together from public records, and those records can sometimes be wrong. I hope he's comfortable with the information I've shared. It's not my wish to put the spotlight on people who do not wish to be in it, but the families discussed are fascinating and so much a part of the fabric of Dayton history. It's neat to be able to discuss their lives and the tremendous contributions they made to our nation.
Hi! I'm Noreen. I used to stay for weeks at a time with my Uncle and Grandma in the Hook mansion.
It was admittedly less grand then the Sherman Mansion but it was and is a gorgeous home. The owner and a descendant of the Founders of Standard Register, JimmyHook was killed in a car accident in the late 70's.
He was a teacher who taught at Sinclair College. He was the closest man I could think of as being the closest thing to an actual leprechaun. Irish 🍀 as Patty's pig and always telling the funniest stories. He was a big supporter of the poor and minority communities of Dayton. His funeral was attended by every notable politician in Ohio and several Washington dignitaries as well. His closest surviving relatives was his younger sister Peggy Clark who lived in Washington DC. I believe she's still alive. She was a very nice lady but was grief ridden by the death of her only brother. They were very close and her children loved their uncle.
The house was the location of a movie recently made called True Nature. Whoever renovated the house did a spectacular job. It is still a marvelous home. English Tudor with amazing character. One of the most beautiful homes I've ever set foot in, by far.
I have such great memories of that place. It is currently for sale for a piddling 919,000. I live in LA now so I'm out, plus 919,000 is SLIGHTLY OUT OF MY LEAGUE.😘
This is a fun forum 😉
A little googling uncovered that a producer of the film is Beth Duke. As far as I know, she and her spouse are the current owners of the home. They have done a magnificent job of renovating the property. It is definitely a Dayton gem.
Thank you for the additional information about Sherman descendant Jimmy Hook. I've been on the hunt for more information about him, but so far haven't turned anything up. He must have been quite a fun character!
This is all good. How I found this site was when another descendant of a great old Dayton family was doing some genealogy research on the Walthers and she ran across this Rike information so she forwarded it along. Fred has memories of going to his grandparents house on Ridgeway, the High Acres property now for sale, EVERY Thurs. night for dinner for years and years. All family members were gathered around and it was a mandatory event. Sort of like the old Dallas T.V. show if anyone is old enough to remember that. Many fun and not so fun conversations took place at the dinner table. He also remembers working in the Rikes Dept. store during his summers before it was sold to Federated. He sold ladies purses.....not quite sure why and also ladies plus size dresses. I guess they wanted to see if he really had the wherewith all to stick with running the store when Uncle David Rike was ready to turn over the reigns. He did not. Luckily Federated came along. He was much better suited to become the editor for the Kettering Oakwood Times once that was up and running. Both of his parents were excellent writers and in fact each wrote 3 or 4 different books. Susie, Susanne Rike McConnaughey, his mother mainly wrote about Tahiti where she had a house for quite some time. His father, Jim McConnaughey, wrote about varied topics. Fred is a very avid reader to this day.
You seemed interested in the Kirchers. Ralf and Ginny Kircher were Fred's godparents which tells you how far back the McConnaughey and Kircher families went. Ted Kircher, who's real name is Ralf Kircher, named after his grandfather just moved back to Dayton from Bangkok, Thailand. Now there is a new thread you might me interested in and he is also an excellent writer.
This is all good. How I found this site was when another descendant of a great old Dayton family was doing some genealogy research on the Walthers and she ran across this Rike information so she forwarded it along. Fred has memories of going to his grandparents house on Ridgeway, the High Acres property now for sale, EVERY Thurs. night for dinner for years and years. All family members were gathered around and it was a mandatory event. Sort of like the old Dallas T.V. show if anyone is old enough to remember that. Many fun and not so fun conversations took place at the dinner table. He also remembers working in the Rikes Dept. store during his summers before it was sold to Federated. He sold ladies purses.....not quite sure why and also ladies plus size dresses. I guess they wanted to see if he really had the wherewith all to stick with running the store when Uncle David Rike was ready to turn over the reigns. He did not. Luckily Federated came along. He was much better suited to become the editor for the Kettering Oakwood Times once that was up and running. Both of his parents were excellent writers and in fact each wrote 3 or 4 different books. Susie, Susanne Rike McConnaughey, his mother mainly wrote about Tahiti where she had a house for quite some time. His father, Jim McConnaughey, wrote about varied topics. Fred is a very avid reader to this day.
You seemed interested in the Kirchers. Ralf and Ginny Kircher were Fred's godparents which tells you how far back the McConnaughey and Kircher families went. Ted Kircher, who's real name is Ralf Kircher, named after his grandfather just moved back to Dayton from Bangkok, Thailand. Now there is a new thread you might me interested in and he is also an excellent writer.
Fascinating! Thank you for the update. Please give my best to your husband.
Excellent question! ...that I cannot answer off the top of my head. I've been mostly focused on going forward in my research rather than backwards in accordance with the OP's question.
And on that note, for those interested in the Shermans of Standard Register, here's an article featuring John Q. Sherman II...
Edit: After a quick glance at the 1910 census, there does not appear to be any direct relationship. John Q.'s paternal grandfather was a German immigrant, while William Tecumseh Sherman comes from a long line of Shermans dating back to the founding of our nation.
Hi there! I'm actually the great-granddaughter of John Q Sherman and I've done extensive research on Ancestry on all sides of my family. John Q is actually related to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. Both Sherman men come from the same English lineage. I know that William Tecumseh is my 5th cousin 6x removed, but I don't know how that would translate in relation to my great-grandfather. If anyone has any questions regarding the Shermans, I can do my best to answer them!
I want to go back for a moment to this part of the post that kicked off the thread, because it's been percolating in the back of my mind for a couple of days, and it's worth discussing further. I think there are a few possible explanations to consider.
The first is the daughter issue. Some of these families were blessed with daughters whose names changed at marriage, obscuring the source of their inherited fortunes. Some of them married into other prominent Dayton families. (Huffman ---> Patterson) Others sent their daughters to be educated elsewhere where they met and married into wealthy and prestigious families from other parts of the country or even world. (Patterson ---> Prescott)
As an aside: Although I haven't checked, I'm wondering if a few of the families who live in the hills of east Oakwood and Kettering and donate generously to the various foundations and charities around the city are heirs to these fortunes. Same money, different names. Note: Although it would make for interesting reading, I'm trying to exercise some restraint in tracing families forward to the current day on a public forum. If I were an heir trying to raise my children out of the limelight, I wouldn't want their names splashed all over the web.
A second issue is the business merger or takeover. Sometimes a company joined forces with one or more other companies doing related work in another part of the country and designated a son, daughter (who has a different surname), or son-in-law to head things up. This could have been the case with families whose fortunes went east, like the Deeds.
Third, we have the remoteness issue. Let's face it, by most standards, Dayton is a pretty small city and a long way from the financial and political powerhouses of New York and DC. These families ran in social circles far beyond the reaches of southwestern Ohio, which leads us back to issues number one and two. I'm thinking here of the Mead family, whose marriage of their first daughter to a Walker smoothed passage of a Mead grandchild into politics.
A fourth issue came about when a local companies went public, thus diluting the originating family's influence. A Board of Directors brought in outside interests who were not rooted in Dayton. I think this was a huge issue for NCR. John H. Patterson was a progressive (at least for the time), who invested heavily in Dayton social programs.* His son, Frederick, stuck around for a few years and then took the company public. At that point, I think the final chapter was written, although it took many decades for NCR to pull up stakes for Georgia. When the descendants lose their place at the table, they'll seek their fortunes (or spend them) elsewhere.
Anyway, this is what has been bouncing around my head. Make of it what you will.
* Somewhere in my research, I came across a statement attributed to Patterson that I found intriguing: "A shroud has no pockets." I don't think you'd find many business magnates today with that attitude!
Still in the Dayton area>>>Rike (McConnaughey & Kircher)/Huffman/Grant/Sherman/Mead....Berry until recently......There was a Patterson living here in the 80s.......
So I started to work on the descendants of Robert C. Schenck and quickly got lost. It's just too far back, and although I know that he was survived by three of his six daughters, I haven't been able to find anything of substance about them. They aren't even named in his NY Times obituary, so that was a bust. I do know that he long outlived his wife, Renelsche, who died of tuberculosis in the mid-nineteenth century. They are both buried in Woodland Cemetery.
So maybe let's do an easier one: Jesse Philips
Jesse Philips was born in New York City in 1911 to Jewish Hungarian immigrants. Having received a scholarship to attend Oberlin College, he went on to Harvard Business School, also on scholarship, earning his M.B.A. in 1939. Settling in Dayton, he went to work in retail, eventually becoming a partner in Johnson-Shelton Home Good Store in 1950. The store was sold in 1956, and Mr. Philips "retired." It did not last long. Within a year, he shelled out $200k for Jalousie Windows of Ohio, a maker of windows for recreational vehicles and mobile homes, which he then built into a billion dollar business called Philips Industries. Wow!
Jesse Philips and first wife Carol Frank had two children, Ellen and Tom, and it's Ellen's family that has piqued my interest. Ellen's first husband was a man named Stephen Schwarzman. You may not immediately recognize his name, but he founded a private equity firm with a former U.S. Secretary of Commerce named Pete Peterson in 1985. The name of that firm -- if you haven't guessed already -- is The Blackstone Group. Notably, Schwarzman recently served as chairman of President Donald Trump's now-disbanded Strategic and Policy Forum.
Ellen and Stephen had two children whose names show up in the pages of The NY Times frequently. Elizabeth, known as Zibby, is a writer, and Teddy is a film producer best known for his fifth movie, The Imitation Game, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing. Great movie, btw! Ellen married her second husband, Howard Katz, a retired general partner of Goldman, Sachs, & Company, in 1997. I believe they are still married.
I haven't had much luck investigating Jesse and Carol's son, Tom. He appears to live in Florida and has three adult children, two daughters and son.
As an aside, Jesse's second wife, Caryl Dombrosky, still owns a home tucked away just a few blocks from what was the Salem Mall, although I believe she now resides full time in Florida. Here's a little more about her. (Scroll down to the third story in the column.)
Last edited by randomparent; 07-13-2018 at 03:31 PM..
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Rike family continued
