Page "Calvin Coolidge" Paragraph 4

Coolidge's family had deep roots in New England.

His earliest American ancestor, John Coolidge, emigrated from Cottenham, Cambridgeshire, England, around 1630 and settled in Watertown, Massachusetts.

Another ancestor, Edmund Rice, arrived at Watertown in 1638.

Coolidge's great-great-grandfather, also named John Coolidge, was an American military officer in the Revolutionary War and one of the first selectmen of the town of Plymouth Notch.

Most of Coolidge's ancestors were farmers.

Other well-known Coolidges, architect Charles Allerton Coolidge, General Charles Austin Coolidge, and diplomat Archibald Cary Coolidge among them, were descended from branches of the family that had remained in Massachusetts.

Coolidge's grandmother Sarah Almeda Brewer had two famous first cousins: Arthur Brown, a United States Senator, and Olympia Brown, a women's suffragist.

It is through Sarah Brewer that Coolidge believed that he inherited American Indian blood, but this descent has never been established by modern genealogists.