The New Yorker:

Some ancestors had money, and some held awful beliefs. A writer sets out to investigate what he once stood to inherit.

By David Owen

In 1866, my mother’s great-grandparents Eugene and Mary Robinson Bremond bought a house and property on a hill overlooking the Colorado River, in what’s now downtown Austin, Texas. Other Bremonds and Robinsons bought or built houses nearby—two of Eugene’s sisters married two of Mary’s brothers—and created a family compound that eventually filled one block and parts of two others. All the houses on the main block are still standing. They look much as they did in the eighteen-hundreds, except that today they’re surrounded by office buildings. In 1970, the area was designated the Bremond Block Historic District.

The Bremonds sold dry goods, and Eugene opened a private bank in the back of the family store. The businesses were so lucrative that in 1876 a local newspaper estimated that five per cent of all the taxes collected in Austin were paid by Bremonds. My mother’s mother, Anne Bremond, was born in 1894. She grew up at the northwest corner of West Eighth and San Antonio, in a house that had been a wedding present to her parents from Eugene. Because of the three interfamily marriages, her regular playmates included the children of fifteen double first cousins. They treated the alley and open area in the center of the block as a communal back yard.

One of the many thoughts I had when I began to learn about all this was: Hold on a second—shouldn’t I be rich? But the path from past to present, when it comes to money, is seldom short, direct, or free of complications. In 2010, Ann Johnston Dolce—my third cousin once removed, whose great-aunt Catherine Robinson also lived on the Bremond Block, in the house next to my grandmother’s—privately published a comprehensive family history. I’m in the book, but my entry is on page 325, and my children’s is sixty-seven pages later. That’s a lot of genealogy for even a huge fortune to filter down through, and this one, whatever it originally amounted to, definitely did not do that.

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