When someone dies, the legacy writers begin their work. Biopics and reams of books appear, all extolling the virtues of the heroes of our past. However, we sometimes forget that our heroes were also flawed people, and history often neglects the more unpleasant parts of famous legacies.

10Abraham Lincoln Allowed Seances And Suspended Constitutional Rights

Abraham Lincoln is one of the most famous leaders in world history, known for presiding over the United States during the Civil War. He is also credited with playing a part in bringing down the institution of slavery. However, what many people don’t realize is that during the extremely tense days leading up to the Civil War, Lincoln became convinced that keeping the Union together was more important than anything. He suspended many constitutional rights, taking a very dark path, believing that anything and everything that could be done must be done.

He was also extremely depressed, suffered from horrible dreams about death and suicide, and along with his wife went half insane from the death of their son. He even went so far as to allow her to conduct seances in the White House in the hopes of speaking with him.

9John. F. Kennedy Cheated On His Wife And Didn’t Care About How It Affected Her

JFK was the closest thing to a rock star president that the United States ever had. He was known for his looks, his charm, and a certain ability to get almost any lady he wanted. Many people know that JFK was quite a hound, but some people don’t know the extent of his philandering. Some stories claim he tried to have sex with a different woman every day if he could and would claim this desire was partly the fault of the medications he took for Addison’s disease.

Many people assume that this was one of those open relationships and his wife was okay with it, but many people believe she was truly hurt by his behavior. Rumors suggest she not only threatened divorce but was once bought out by his father to the tune of $1 million, so she wouldn’t put the family through an embarrassing divorce.

8Benjamin Franklin Constantly Tried To Ruin Other People For Petty Reasons

Benjamin Franklin is known for being one of the fathers of the American revolution. He acted mainly as a diplomat, forging connections across the pond to help the fledgling colonies in their revolt. He was also an inventor, coming up with the lightning rod, bifocals and several other seemingly unrelated ideas.

However, while he is often celebrated for his genius, he was not a very nice guy. He had a very harsh upbringing and would use his newspapers in an attempt to ruin the lives of rivals. He once went so far as to convince everyone his biggest rival was dead—despite the man’s insistence otherwise.

7Margaret Sanger Was A Huge Fan Of Eugenics

Margaret Sanger was an avowed feminist in the early 1900s and at one point faced prosecution for her rather controversial writings and speeches. She opened the first birth control clinic in the United States of America, which went on to become what Planned Parenthood is today. While people with a certain viewpoint may not appreciate birth control in any form, there was a more insidious issue lurking behind her interest in birth control.

Sanger was a big supporter of eugenics, the idea that only the healthy and fit should continue to reproduce or live, and the others should be weeded out. Some people have even suggested that the first birth control clinics were set up near black neighborhoods, proving her racist intentions as a eugenicist. Her actual intentions on this particular matter are hard to prove.

6Lemmy Kilmister Was A Huge Fan Of Nazi Memorabilia

Lemmy Kilmister was the leader of the metal band Motorhead and lived quite a long life for someone who abused substances as much as he did. He was known for loving his drink to an absolutely insane degree—he reportedly drank at least a fifth of whiskey every day for years. He was also known for having a very poor diet in general, but for the most part, he was a likeable guy.

However, many people don’t know that Kilmister was a huge fan of collecting Nazi memorabilia. While he claimed that he had no interest in actual Nazi ideas, many people found it extremely insensitive and felt the way he plastered it on his walls went beyond collecting history.

5Patrick Stewart Is Alleged To Be Incredibly Overbearing And Arrogant In Person

Patrick Stewart is famous for starring in Star Trek: The Next Generation and playing Professor Charles Xavier of the X-Men. In recent years he has been the subject of many memes and has become a beloved pop culture icon. However, memes make people out to be somewhat larger than life, but in the end, we are all human.

On stage during a presentation recently at an award ceremony, he started criticizing and insulting the presenter, James Corden. Corden would later state that he felt weird arguing back against such a respected voice, but he was taken aback by the criticism and felt the need to defend himself.

4Peter Sellers Was Infamous For Being Almost Impossible To Work With

Peter Sellers is famous for movies like the Pink Panther series and for playing multiple parts in the Stanley Kubrick classic Dr. Strangelove. He was able to perform a variety of accents and dialects flawlessly, and his attention to detail as an actor was second to none.

This was also his greatest flaw, as he drove everyone he worked with crazy. His family told of him being a very depressed man who was never happy with any of his work. Some producers, despite his star power, wanted nothing to do with him after working with him just once. The man’s perfectionism sometimes blinded him so much that he didn’t realize no one could stand being around him.

3Steve Jobs Cheated His Best Friend Wozniak With No Remorse

Steve Jobs left a legacy behind as the founder of Apple and the promoter of various doodads like the iPhone and the iPod. Many people remember Steve Jobs as a genius at marketing—the man could build hype like nothing else. Biopics were made about the man almost as soon as he died, and many people still extol his virtues.

However, Jobs was not a very nice guy. He had a standing policy that Apple will never donate to charity, to make as much money as possible. He consistently had his engineers do all the work and then personally took credit, and he once cheated his friend Steve Wozniak out of money back when they were first working together. It wasn’t even that much money, but Jobs did it out of petty greed. Wozniak was hurt later when he found out, never understanding why his once friend would be so awful to others.

2Henry Ford Was A Nazi Sympathizer And A Loony Vegan

Henry Ford is known for being the namesake of the Ford automobile company—still the first and longest running major automobile manufacturer in the country. Even more importantly, Ford revolutionized assembly line technology, in a way that changed production the world over forever.

Unfortunately, Ford was also a huge Nazi sympathizer. He was one of those on the side of Hitler before we got involved, and he remained a supporter of the ideals after the war was over. While some businesses would not work with Germany during those years, Ford was all too happy to help. He also believed that he could subsist eating random weeds—a theory he designed based on the idea that humans were like cars and just needed basic fuel of any kind at all.

1Carnegie The Philanthropist Was A Cruel Despot

Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Mellon, the Carnegie Institute—his name can also be seen on libraries and random concert halls all over the United States of America. Many people think of Andrew Carnegie as a great philanthropist, but his real history shows a much different picture.

Carnegie made his fortune on massive worker exploitation, to a point that even the most fervent anti-union person today would have thought his employees needed a good union. He would even call in the army and just force people to work for a pittance if he had to. Carnegie ran work camps, with whole families and generations controlled by his evil, helping him earn more fortune to enjoy.

In his later life, Carnegie felt guilty about what a horrible person he had been, and started massively donating money to charitable causes—all while many people toiled away in his camps, making him enjoy a rich life, still slaves.

+ Further Reading

History favors the victor and sometimes it conveniently forgets the darker side. Here are a few more lists than prove this:

10 Shameful Ways People Cheapened Important Legacies
10 Successful People Trapped In Their Parents’ Shadow
10 People Who Were Erased From History
Top 10 Legacies of the Middle Ages

Legacy is a big deal to some people. They have this need to leave something behind, to know that their family name will carry on or, at least, something they created. A family business, a tradition, whatever. Sometimes these legacies can grow into something no one ever predicted and become noteworthy not just for those involved, but for all of us.

10. The Same Family Has Run the World’s Oldest Inn for 52 Generations

A family run business is wholesome and trustworthy. That seems to be the message being delivered by stating that and many businesses are happy to do it. They’ll let you know that they’ve been making sausages or fixing mufflers for three generations or whatever it may be. But if generational work is wholesome, then Japan’s Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan Inn is the most wholesome and trustworthy business in the world’s history.

The Japanese inn has been in business since the year 705, making it over 1,300 years old. In that time it’s been run by the same family for an astonishing 52 generations. Good luck finding anything with more of a legacy than that.

Obviously, the inn has been upgraded over the years to include modern ideas, you know, things like electricity and plumbing, it’s otherwise the same business. 

9. A New Orleans Restaurant Has Been Run By the Same Family for 5 Generations

When you want good food at a restaurant, you’re never wrong to look for a family-owned, generational business. If the person running a restaurant got it from their parents who got it from their parents, and it’s still in business, that means they know how to cook. You can’t stay in business for generations with awful food. 

There are several very old restaurants in America, some of which date back to the 1600s, but if you want a legacy restaurant, something passed down through generations, you want to go to Antoine’s in New Orleans. This is the oldest, family-run restaurant in America and dates back five generations to 1840 when it was established. 

Started by French chef Antoine Alciatore in New Orleans’ famous French Quarter, the restaurant had humble beginnings as both a restaurant and a hostel. Thirty years later his son was running it with famous recipes for things like Oysters Rockefeller and Baked Alaska.

The restaurant succeeded and expanded massively. It had seating for 800 people, which is not something you’ll see in many places today. Son passed it to son passed it to nephew, and the legacy continues to this day. 

8. The Largest Generational Photo Featured 6 Generations of Women

How do you feel about getting together for a formal family photo? Some people love it and some think it’s a hassle. The more people involved the bigger hassle it tends to be, and getting everything together, especially if there are older relatives and little kids to deal with, can make it even harder. 

In 2023, what may be the largest generational family photo ever was taken in Canada when six generations of women came together to take a picture which included a newborn named Zhavia being held by her great-great-great grandmother.

The 98-year-old matriarch first married when she was 16 and had 13 children with her husband, who’d already had 10 from previous relationships. Over the years those children had many children and, according to the family at the time the picture was taken, the baby was family member number 621.

7. The Most Generations Alive at One Time Was 7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIA_5BBTAK8

Six generations alive in a single photo seems like a lot, and it is. Just do the math on how this has to work out. If a generation happens every 20 years, then grandma is 40, great-grandma is 60, great-great grandma is 80 and great-great-great-grandma is 100. And that’s more or less how it breaks down for the six-generation family we already mentioned. So let’s add one and focus on the family with the most generations alive at one time with seven.

In 1989, a 109-year-old woman named Augusta Bunge was alive to see the birth of her great-great-great-great-grandson. The family currently holds a World Record for the most living generations at one time. 

6. The Genealogy of Confucius Covers Over 80 Generations

If you’re not super familiar with Eastern philosophy, you may not know much about Confucius. His analects are often quoted, or intentionally misquoted as jokes, despite being written over 2,400 years ago. His teachings dealt with morality, virtue, and something of a social or cultural ethic that could be developed through cultivating and understanding these and related concepts. 

In modern times, Confucius stands as the most prominent member of what Guinness has recognized as the world’s longest family tree. There is an entire society dedicated to cataloging the family tree called the Confucius Genealogy Compilation Committee. In 2009 they released the 5th edition which contains 80 volumes and weighs half a ton. Confucius’s family tree spans 80 generations and over two million descendants.

The collection was also digitized around 2012 and had covered 83 generations at that point. It was 43,000 pages long.  

5. Three Generations of the Same Family Having Been Rubbing Mud on MLB Balls

Do you know what makes major league baseball the big time? What separates it from minor leagues or high school games or just you and your buddies playing a weekend game at the park? The answer is mud. It’s all in the mud. Just ask Jim Bintliff.

Bintliff is a third-generation Major League Baseball mudman. Is that a thing, you might wonder? It is. And Jim Bintliff is the only one, just like his dad before him was, and his grandfather before that.

Every year, the MLB goes through about 240,000 baseballs. Every single baseball, despite being unplayed and technically brand new when it’s introduced in a game, is going to be scuffed and dirty. Like working in your baseball glove, you don’t want a shiny new ball. You want one that’s been worked in to make it ready for play and that requires getting it dirty. That is Jim Bintliff’s job. He collects mud and rubs it on thousands of baseballs.

Jim harvests his mud from a certain part of the Delaware River. It’s described as being a little thicker than chocolate pudding and perfect for removing the factory sheen of a ball without clogging up the seams. It gives the pitcher the perfect grip, and it is the only mud the MLB will allow.

So where does the mud come from?  Don’t ask the MLB, because even they don’t know. Despite being the only mud allowed, only Bintliff holds the secret which is why his family has been doing it for three generations.

4. Kevin Bacon is Part of the World’s Biggest Family Tree

If you recall, we just called the family tree of Confucius the longest in the world and that’s true. But long and big don’t mean the same thing. The biggest family tree in the world belongs to the one person more people have tried to link themselves to than anyone else in history: Kevin Bacon.

It’s not technically Kevin Bacon’s family tree, but it’s a family tree with Kevin Bacon on it. It also includes about 13 million other people and spans 11 generations going back 5 centuries. The construction of the tree was a project that took years and allowed researchers to use public data to assemble a vast database. 

They could see where major world events occurred like the Civil War and the World Wars that led to lifespan drops, and they even calculated how much of a part genetics played in overall lifespan. Based on their info, genetics only affect 16% of your potential lifespan, overall.

3. Three Generations of Airmen Have Served Aboard B-52s 

The military spends a lot of time and money developing weapons and once it has effective ones, it holds onto them like grim death. For instance, Saab designs military jet fighters, and a generation of planes is meant to provide reliable service for up to 30 or 40 years. 

One plane that saw extensive military service and is fairly well known even among civilians is the B-52. These bombers were designed in the 1940s but WWII ended before they were finished and could be deployed. The very first model hit the air in 1952.

Because B-52s are still in service today, they are one of the longest-running aircraft in service with over 70 years in the air. So maybe it’s no surprise that three generations of airmen have served aboard these aircraft in the Welch family. 

Colonel Don Sprague flew the B-52 back in the 1970s. His son, Lt. Colonel Don Welch was a pilot based out of Las Vegas who piloted them, and then in 2011 his son, Captain Daniel Welch, joined the same squadron his grandfather commanded.

2. The Beretta Gun Company Has Been in the Same Family for 15 Generations

Remember when we said something about family businesses being wholesome earlier? Anyway, the Beretta gun company is also a family business that has been in the same family for 15 generations, since the year 1526.  

It was in that year that Bartolomeo Beretta sold 185 barrels of portable arquebus guns to Venice. Although the family believes he was actually running the company for about 80 years by that point, but this was his big score. For this, he was paid 296 Venetian ducats. At 3.545 grams of gold each, that was 1049.32 grams of gold. The price fluctuates, of course, but that’s about $64,000 today.

The price must have been right for Beretta because he kept at it. These days, 15 generations later, the company sees about $826 million in annual sales, so they’re making a few more ducats than Bartolomeo did. 

1. The Blue Fugates Lived For 7 Generations in the Appalachian Mountains

We’ve already seen some impressive generational feats ranging from businesses to simply the size of a family or how many of them are alive at the same time. But no one in the world, no one in history, comes close to matching the feat achieved by the Fugate family of Kentucky. The Fugates were around for a respectable seven generations in the Appalachian mountains and they did it while being blue.

You may have heard of the Fugates before and the use of the word blue here isn’t a euphemism for sad or anything, it’s a literal, physical description of them. Thanks to a recessive gene that caused methemoglobinemia, the Fugate family suffered from a blue hue to their skin. Though very rare, it pops up from time to time in other people, though usually it will be a single family member born with the condition unexpectedly. The Fugates, of course, spent seven generations passing these genes on thanks to a very limited gene pool in their little corner of the mountains meaning family members were all related and the normally recessive gene always presented itself.

Way back in the day, the patriarch of the family line was a man named Martin Fugate, an orphan from France. He carried this rare gene that caused his blood to carry increased amounts of methemoglobin, which is a kind of hemoglobin that doesn’t work quite right. Hemoglobin transports oxygen through the blood but methemoglobin can’t. This tints lips purple, skin blue, and it also means they have brownish blood that’s oxygen-poor.

Having a condition that leads to methemoglobinemia can cause serious health issues if your blood has too much. But there is a sweet spot of about 10% to 20% of it in your blood, you will develop the physical characteristics but not the major health concerns. As a result, the Fugates who kept intermarrying family members who carried the gene kept producing blue offspring who were otherwise healthy and many of whom survived to their 80s.

In time, the Fugate family spread out, and the family stopped reproducing together, allowing a more diverse gene pool and the condition was no longer an issue.