Word: blauvelt
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Declining to Deny. Just who first spotted the paragraph about Family Member No. 12,427 remains unknown. But around the spring of 1961, photostatic copies of the page from The Blauvelt Family Genealogy began to be passed around. The person showing the page usually knew no more than was printed on it, and, depending on who he was, he either accepted it as fact or thought it a good joke. Newsmen heard about it and, understandably, became curious. The best, fastest, most direct way of checking seemed to be by asking the parties involved: President Kennedy and Mrs. Durie Malcolm...
...this only whetted interest. In the absence of forthright denials, the story-and the rumors-grew. Last March, The Realist, a shabby Greenwich Village periodical, published the fact of the Blauvelt genealogical entry as an "expose." So, a bit later, did Birmingham's antiSemitic, anti-Negro circular, The Thunderbolt ("The White Man's Viewpoint"). So, in June, did The Winrod Letter, a oamphlet put out by the Rev. Gordon Winrod of Little Rock. Racist organizations in the South and crackpot groups everywhere photostated these pieces and sent them out as junk mail by the scores of thousands...
...chided the U.S. press for staying silent. Last Sept. 2, recognition in a mass U.S. publication was given for the first time to the fact that the question even existed. The Sunday supplement Parade (circ. 10 million) published a reader's letter asking about the truth of the Blauvelt genealogical item; Parade's answer was a flat refutation. London's huge Sunday papers, including the respectable Sunday Telegraph and Observer, promptly picked up the Parade question-and-answer as a way of getting the story into print...
...Blauvelt genealogy, printed under the auspices of the Association of Blauvelt Descendants and sold at $30 a copy, was the work of a quiet and patient man named Louis L. Blauvelt. By occupation he was a skilled General Electric toolmaker in Bloomfield, N.J. By preoccupation he was the family historian-and he spent 35 years compiling his tome. He recognized the possibility of error in his preface. Wrote he: "There no doubt will be errors in this work. For the most part these will be the fault of imperfect information that has come to me from one source or another...
...Louis Blauvelt died in 1959, at the age of 79, just two years after his genealogy was published...