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I am. It’s all over the Henry Livingston website, and mentioned several times when I first discussed the attribution arguments here. 5th great granddaughter.

Actually, I adore Congressman Livingston, and was sorry for his disgrace.

I got into genealogy with the hope to discover a relative of my father’s who might have had one of his books of poetry. This is all over the website, too. Mother left father, a military poet and an alcoholic, when I was 6 weeks old and he died before I could search him out. I tried to find his books as a way to learning about him. Genealogy became my desperate attempt to discover his work. Instead, I found a mind numbing array of ancestors that left my jaw sitting on the pavement.

Great grandfather ran the Lincoln assassination investigation for Stanton, was one of the special judge advocates and put together the records for the Library of Congress, which are in his handwriting. He married the daughter of another General, who was the grandson of ... and it went on and on and on. 3rd great grandfather merged his railroad with others to form the New York Central. This one and that one entertained LaFayette and rode on the first Erie Canal boat. That one owned most of NY state and descended from the man who interviewed the king who wanted to land in Scotland. That one won an award for translating the bible.

When I found Henry and discovered that the Internet said he wrote NBC, it was one sort of a shock, but not an ultimate one. He was just one of a bunch of people who by now was beyond shocking me. But I’m a researcher and I needed to know if it was true. Took me WEEKS to find a book of Clement Moore’s, and only then because Brown University allowed me to print their microfilm. As it printed out, I realized that there was not the faintest possibility that the man who wrote that wondrous poem was the same man of small spirit I saw in these horrible poems. The poems no one else read because they WERE so horrible.

I was determined then to be part of the group that set about righting that wrong. And that’s what I’ve done for twenty years. As the former chair of computer programming languages, I had the research skills and was anal compulsive enough to do the research work involved. I pulled the first professor into the quest, and the second more famous one found me and asked for my help because he thought he had the approach that would settle the matter. I worked with him for three solid years to pull numbers out of poetry. If those numbers had proven Moore the author I would have been content because I follow research where it leads.

But it didn’t. It proved Moore statistically could not have written the poem and Livingston could have.

That made sense of all of the family stories of people who had HEARD Henry read the poem and those who had inherited the original manuscript of the poem from one another, until one son lost it in a fire.

So either all those family members lied to one another or one nasty man who, according to the Livingston stories, received a copy from an enraptured governess heading south to work for a Moore family and dropped a copy at Clement Moore’s on her way, lied to his family when he read them the poem as his own and told them not to tell it to anyone. One of the kids slipped, passed the poem onto a distant relative who got it published. Moore eventually published the poem 21 years later to the pressure of his children wanting him to get the credit. But first he wrote the editor of the newspaper and asked if when he published it he had known the author. When the editor said no, Moore published the massively edited version of the poem that the editor had written his letter on the back of, his family explaining in depositions later that there was no corrected original because he wrote it down perfectly and only changed a few words when he published it under his own name in 1844. Because Moore never knew that the massively edited one was NOT the originally published version. If he’d written it, he would have known.

Basically, I’m the world expert on the topic, and the one the researchers contact for information. I see this as something Henry wouldn’t have cared about because he never took credit for anything except the drawings he published. But I hate injustice, which is why I’m a conservative and adore Trump. And this, to me, is a great injustice that needs the truth being exposed.

I can’t do much for Trump, but I do have the skills to do something for Henry.

As for Congressman Livingston, I was stymied in my Livingston research. They all carry the same names, so I reached out to his legislative office. One day my phone rang and a deep voice said, “This is Bob Livingston. Welcome to the Livingston family.” Now I couldn’t vote for him. He did this because he was a good man who cared about people and was probably an excellent representative for his district. I’ve adored him ever since. And his name opened the research door for me at the Livingston estate and cleared the way that led from Henry’s daughter Catharine to Henry, himself.

Whew, that was a long YES.

Oh, and I did eventually discover my father’s book. His name was mispelled. And the poetry column in my old college newspaper where father courted my 16 year old mother in poetry and she answered him back in the same. And because of what I had learned in researching poetry, I was able to wend my way through a myriad of pseudonyms to trace their up and down relationship until the army sent him to New York from Chicago.

And I was able to get great grandfather’s grave cleared of debris, his great brass plate identified, and a military group to take over the grave and put up a historical plaque. A national park ranger even contacted me from Ford Theater who wanted to play great grandfather, based on the memories ggf had published of the Lincoln trial.

It’s been a quest and a half and a great deal of learning, which is the most fun possible.