Page 97 - Cousins - Celebrities, Saints & Sinners

Howard Hughes

11th Cousin

Common Ancestor

Father: George Downing
Ipswich, Suffolk, England
1552 - 1610

Mother: Dorcas Bellamy Born: Died:
Ipswich, Suffolk, England 24 December 1905 5 April 1976
1556 -1610 Humble, Texas Houston, Texas

Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was an American business
magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, film director,
and philanthropist, known during his lifetime as one of the
most financially successful individuals in the world. He first
became prominent as a film producer, and then as an
influential figure in the aviation industry. Later in life, he
became known for his eccentric behavior and reclusive
lifestyle – oddities that were caused in part by a
worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), chronic
pain from a near-fatal plane crash and increasing deafness.
As a film tycoon, Hughes gained fame in Hollywood beginning
in the late 1920s, when he produced big-budget and often
controversial films such as The Racket (1928), Hell's
Angels (1930), and Scarface (1932). Later he controlled
the RKO film studio.

Hughes formed the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932, hiring
numerous engineers and designers. He spent the rest of the

1930s and much of the 1940s setting multiple world air speed records and building the Hughes H-1 Racer
and H-4 Hercules (the Spruce Goose). He acquired and expanded Trans World Airlines and later acquired Air
West, renaming it Hughes Airwest. Hughes was included in Flying Magazine's list of the 51 Heroes of Aviation,
ranked at No. 25. Today, his legacy is maintained through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and
the Howard Hughes Corporation.

Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was the son of Allene Stone Gano (1883–1922) and of Howard R. Hughes Sr. (1869–
1924), a successful inventor and businessman from Missouri. He had English, Welsh and some
French Huguenot ancestry, and was a descendant of John Gano (1727–1804), the minister who allegedly
th
baptized George Washington (6 cousin, 7 times removed). His father patented (1909) the two-cone roller bit,
which allowed rotary drilling for petroleum in previously inaccessible places. The senior Hughes made the
shrewd and lucrative decision to commercialize the invention by leasing the bits instead of selling them,
obtained several early patents, and founded the Hughes Tool Company in 1909. Hughes' uncle was the famed
novelist, screenwriter, and film-director Rupert Hughes.

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