ried. George was married three times, but reared only one child to maturity; Robert, who was as fine an engineer as his father. He was a well educated man, a member of Parliament, and a man of much wealth. He married, but died in 1859, childless. There is not a single descendant of George Stephenson now living. The only living grandchild of Robert, 2d, is George Robert Stephenson, of Cheltenham, England. He is a son of Robert, the third son of old Robert, 2d, of Wylam. Ann, the youngest child, married John Nixon and reared a family in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Her descendants are numerous.
The reason that historians were thrown off the trail of the ancestors of George Stephenson is due to the fact that they followed the clew, that Robert Stephenson, the father of the railroad promoter, went direct from Scotland to England, which was not the fact. Robert Stephenson, 2d, was born in North Ireland, in 1752. My first information as to the time of his birth was that he was born in 1748. But from information recently obtained, I find it was his sister, Elizabeth, who was born in 1748, and Robert was born in 1752. He was born of Scottish parents. George Robert Stephenson, of Cheltenham, England, now (1905) over 86 years old, is very conservative and cautious. In a letter to me, dated February, 1905, referring to my statement of the early history of the Stephensons, as above given, he says, "Your own version of the story, namely, that Robert had brothers and sisters, who emigrated to South Carolina, is quite feasible. Our own account is that Robert had brothers and, perhaps, sisters; and it is certainly odd that nothing should be known about them; but if all, or most, of them went to the States, such disappearance is easily
