The interesting people you find in your history

I am still working on the Tatman family. I figure I will give it another week or so before I move on. It is not that there is a shortage of information because there isn't. In fact, there is an abundance of information readily available on the internet about them.

The key with genealogy is to do alot of the work yourself to make sure you have the right information to start with and then you can post your family tree online and let the cousins out there find you and help add to it. Right now, I have about 1,100 descendants of James Tatman (born 1744 in the Virginia Colonies) and his wife Sarah Murdock. So, I would say it is coming along just fine.

Every now and then you run across famous people in someones tree. My father in law Bill has a few of them. One being Daniel Boone. Yup, that Daniel Boone! The other is the fellow below. His name is Stanley Foreman Reed. Stanley is related to the Tatmans by marriage.

Here is a portrait of Stanley:





Stanley Foreman Reed was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to be an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court. His biography follows:

"Stanley Foreman Reed of Kentucky was nominated as the sixty-ninth Associate Justice of the Supreme Court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 15, 1938, succeeding Justice George Sutherland. He served on the court for 19 years under Chief Justices Hughes, Stone, Vinson and Warren. He wrote 231 majority opinions, 20 concurrences and 88 dissents. After his retirement on February 25, 1957,he served briefly as Chairman of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Commission. He died on April 2, 1980, at the age of ninety-five.

Reed, son of Dr. John A. Reed, a practicing physician, and Frances (Foreman) Reed, was born December 31, 1884, in Minerva, Mason County, Kentucky. After a public school education, he entered Kentucky Wesleyan College and was graduated in 1902. He went on to Yale University for a second bachelor's degree, conferred in 1906. He next studied law successively at the University of Virginia Law School, at Columbia University Law School and at the Sorbonne law faculty in Paris, without ever taking a formal law degree at any one of these institutions. After returning from Paris, Reed was admitted to the Kentucky Bar in 1910 and established a law practice in Maysville, Kentucky. In 1912, and again in 1914, he was elected to the Kentucky Legislature as the representative from Mason County.

During World War I, he served as a First Lieutenant in the Untied States Army. He served as a first lieutenant in the Army during World War I. Later he served as General Counsel for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation by appointment of President Hoover. As special assistant to the Attorney General, he argued the Gold Clause cases, 294 U.S. 240 (1935), before the Supreme Court. Beginning in 1935, he served three exciting years as Solicitor General. After losing the NRA case, 294 U.S. 495 (1935), and the AAA case, 297 U.S. 1 (1936), he successfully defended the Tennessee Valley Authority Act in Ashwander v. TVA, 297 U.S. 288 (1936).

Among his opinions as an Associate Justice were United States v. Rock Royal Co-operative, 307 U.S. 533 (1939); United States v. Appalachian Electric Power Company, 311 U.S. 377 (1940); and Morgan v. Virginia, 328 U.S. 373 (1946). He voted with the unanimous court in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Died at 96 years. Services were held at Trinity United States Methodist Church in Maysville, Kentucky, prior to his interment in the Maysville Cemetery on April 8, 1980 [449 U.S. XXXVII (1982)]."Biography courtesy of the following website: http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/lib_hist/courts/supreme/judges/reed.html