In a photograph of Lincoln’s New York funeral procession there can be seen the mansion of Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, one of the city’s ten millionaires with a fortune based in real estate and merchandising plate glass. Watching from one of the windows are two little boys, believed to be Cornelius’s grandsons, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Elliott. Their father, Theodore Sr., lived more modestly in a brownstone on East Twentieth Street, where Theodore Jr., the future president, was born in 1858. He had been preceded by a sister, Anna, nicknamed Bamie, who in middle age married a naval officer, W. Sheffield Cowles, and was followed by another sister, Corinne, who wed the wealthy Douglas Robinson, and a younger brother, Elliott. The sisters, brilliant and admirable women, were lifelong devotees of their brother Theodore, but Elliott, despite good looks, charm, and intellectual ability, took early to drink and died a miserable failure, somewhat redeeming himself to history by fathering Eleanor.
