This post is not a book review of Daniel J. Brown’s The Indifferent Stars Above (see screen capture). Instead, it’s about a family connection the author has to the book’s subject—the ill-fated Donner Party, a California-bound group of emigrants who were trapped by heavy snows in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846–47.
Brown’s book is excellent and I highly recommend it whether you are a history buff or just want to read a nonfiction adventure story with hardship, tragedy, and perseverance. Brown is also the author of The Boys in the Boat, a book about the scrappy University of Washington crew team who won the gold medal at the 1936 Olympics.
In the Prologue to The Indifferent Stars Above, Brown mentions his father’s uncle—George W. Tucker. This is in a passage about locating Tucker’s grave in California’s Bothe-Napa Valley State Park in 2006 as part of Brown’s research for the book. The Tucker family were not members of the Donner Party but did travel with them as part of a larger group of emigrants who left Missouri for California in late spring 1846. The Tuckers all arrived safely in Sutter’s Mill, California. Tragically, after splitting off from the main group in Wyoming to take an unproven route called the Hastings Cutoff, almost half of the Donner Party perished in a snowed-in camp near present day Truckee Lake, California.
In telling the Donner Party story, Brown focuses on a young married woman named Sarah Graves Fosdick, whose family were Donner Party members. Sarah survived the ordeal although some members of the Graves family did not.
George Tucker (b. 1831) was a few years younger than Sarah. He was 15 during the trip to California while she was adult woman of 21. But he almost certainly would have known her as their families were friendly during the time they traveled together. Brown called his own family connection to the Donner Party tenuous. I would call it remarkable.
Given that a generation is accepted to be about 25 years, how can a person living today (Brown) have a great-uncle who was a teenager during an event 181 years ago? That’s right, only two generations separate the two men.
For one thing, I’m using generation to loosely mean overlapping lifespans where families are involved, while the common meaning is the time span from the birth of a child to the time he/she becomes a parent.
Second, George Tucker lived until 1907 while Brown was born in 1951. So there could be just one generation between Brown’s father and Tucker. It depends on when Brown Sr. was born. Brown doesn’t specify this, nor does he state whether Tucker was an uncle by marriage or his father’s brother. In either case, he would be considered family.
Confused? It’s hard to visualize without a family tree so I’m just taking the author’s word for it. He’s that good of a researcher. I will say that knowing about his family connection made me enjoy the book more.
To cap this post, there’s a much better-known example of long generations. John Tyler, our tenth president (1841–1845), had a grandson who lived until May 2025. There’s a span of 235 years between President Tyler’s birth in 1790 and the death of his last grandson. The details are well documented online.
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