Page 103 - Cousins - Celebrities, Saints & Sinners

J. P. Morgan

6th Cousin

2 times removed

Common Ancestor Born: Died:
17 April 1837 31 March 1913
Father: Isaac Sheldon Hartford, Connecticut Rome, Italy
Ashwel, Hertfordshire, England
1629 - 1708 John Pierpont Morgan Sr. was an

American financier and banker who
Mother: Isabel Mary Woodford
Hartford, Connecticut, British Colonial dominated corporate finance on Wall
Street throughout the Gilded Age. As the head of the
America
1636 - 1684 banking firm that ultimately became known as J.P.
Morgan and Co., he was a driving force behind the
wave of industrial consolidation in the United States
spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Over the course of his career on Wall Street, J.P.
Morgan spearheaded the formation of several
prominent multinational corporations including U.S.
Steel Corporation, International Harvester and General
Electric. He and his partners also held controlling
interests in numerous other American businesses
including AT&T, Western Union and 24 railroads. Due
to his financial dominance, Morgan came to wield

enormous influence over the nation's lawmakers and finances During the Panic of 1907, he
organized a coalition of financiers that saved the American economy from collapse.

As the Progressive Era's leading financier, J.P. Morgan's dedication to efficiency and
modernization helped transform the shape of the American economy. Adrian
Wooldridge characterized Morgan as America's "greatest banker". Morgan died in Rome, Italy,
in his sleep in 1913 at the age of 75.

Morgan often had a tremendous physical effect on people; one man said that a visit from
Morgan left him feeling "as if a gale had blown through the house." Morgan was physically
large with massive shoulders, piercing eyes, and a purple nose. He was known to dislike
publicity and hated being photographed; as a result of his self-consciousness of his rosacea, all
his professional portraits were retouched. His deformed nose was due to a disease
called rhinophyma, which can result from rosacea. As the deformity worsens, pits, nodules,
fissures, lobulations, and pedunculation contort the nose. This condition inspired the crude
taunt "Johnny Morgan's nasal organ has a purple hue." Surgeons could have shaved away the
rhinophymous growth of sebaceous tissue during Morgan's lifetime, but as a child he suffered
from infantile seizures, and Morgan's son-in-law, Herbert L. Satterlee, has speculated that he

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