'Grandson of Warren G. Harding and Lover Wants U.S. President's Body Exhumed'
Last edited Mon Sep 14, 2020, 04:50 PM - Edit history (3)
'Grandson of Harding and lover wants president’s body exhumed.' By Julie Carr Smyth, AP News, Sept. 12, 2020.
- April 13, 1921, President Warren G. Harding throws out the first ball to open the Washington Senators' baseball season. The grandson of Harding has gone to court seeking to dig up the Republican's remains from the presidential memorial where they have lain since 1927. (AP)
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The grandson of U.S. President Warren G. Harding and his lover, Nan Britton, went to court in an effort to get the Republican’s remains exhumed from the presidential memorial where they have lain since 1927. James Blaesing told an Ohio court that he is seeking Harding’s disinterment as a way “to establish with scientific certainty” that he is the 29th president’s blood relation. The dispute looms as benefactors prepare to mark the centennial of Harding’s 1920 election with site upgrades and a new presidential center in Marion, the Ohio city near which he was born in 1865.
Blaesing says he deserves to “have his story, his mother’s story and his grandmother’s story included within the hallowed halls and museums in this town.” A branch of the Harding family has pushed back against the suit filed in May — not because they dispute Blaesing’s ancestry, but because they don’t. They argue they already have accepted as fact DNA evidence that Blaesing’s mother, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was the daughter of Harding and Britton and that she is set to be acknowledged in the museum. Harding had no other children.
“Sadly, widespread, public recognition and acceptance by the descendants, and biographers (and Mr. Blaesing himself) that Mr. Blaesing is President Harding’s grandson is not enough for him,” relatives said in a court filing. They called the lawsuit a ploy for attention. In 2015, a match between James Blaesing’s DNA and that of two Harding descendants prompted AncestryDNA, a DNA-testing division of Ancestry.com, to declare his link to the president official.
At the time, Blaesing told The Associated Press he was delighted. Five years later, he tells the AP his mother’s legacy as the daughter of a U.S. president is shaping up to be little more than a footnote in the new museum. He has not been approached to provide details of her life or even a photograph for the coming display, he said. “I did the test and we brought it to the public in 2015. It’s now 2020 and no one has asked me one thing,” he said in a telephone interview. “I’m not a part of anything. Nothing. My brothers, myself, no one. We’re invisible. They’re treating us just like they treated my grandmother.”
Blaesing said he is hopeful that a match directly to the president’s own DNA would change that...
More, https://apnews.com/ecb0a2826ce7ea8a818fb9be08c98c0e
- Nan Britton & daughter Elizabeth Ann Blaesing by Warren Harding. Eliz. is the mother of James Blaesing.
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