The Githens Brothers of Illinois...and Wisconsin, and Indiana, and other places, were well-known members of Chicago society at the turn of the 20th century. After a decade of success as bicycle and automobile racers, they had gone into the still quite new business of automobile retailers. First as Buick specialists, and then as the controlling interest in all Maxwells sold in the upper midwest, they were locally famous and pretty rich.
Their mother was my third-great aunt, and it was in tracing their ancestry I first came on them. That mother, Perlonia Johnson, is still a possible clue to solving one of the larger, more recent mysteries in my own ancestry, and so I pursue them.
What happened along the way was that I became interested in them for their own sake. Only one of them had a child, and for all I can tell there may not be any of that woman's descendants living. So I guess it's come to me to write about them.
More as we go.
Michael Ward
San Jose, California
20 August 2019
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