Donoghue has created a remarkable, heavily researched memoir of some people surrounding 28th President of the United States Woodrow Wilson and his second wife Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, both natives of Virginia and supporters of The Lost Cause. They courted and married relatively under the radar as he lived in the White House and she nearby in a whirlwind love affair in 1915. The book reveals for the first time the shocking story that Edith related to the President the first time they had a chance to converse. It also explores their joint racism and support for one of the most notorious White Supremacists of his time who served as Wilson’s close confidante and cabinet member. It does this by exposing the layered nature of a photograph that the Wilsons autographed and presented to the Galt-Valentines— Donoghue’s mother’s ancestors, a Northern family residing mostly in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who Donoghue discovers in depth for the first time and rescues from obscurity. This book explores how the Wilsons’s lives were entwined with Donoghue’s mother’s family— and how he discovered the connections and implications of that. The Galt-Valentines were mostly academics and family-oriented professionals, apolitical community-minded, upper middle-class people in small towns. They mostly cherished the relationship with Mrs. Wilson, married to a niece and cousin twenty years before she met the President, and were glad for her new-found happiness in high places. What they likely did not know about the Wilsons’ racist proclivities Donoghue only discovered through deep research and the passage of time. 

Join us for an example of the outing of this once prized relative now unwanted and hanging onto the family tree only by virtue of her first marriage which ended with her husband’s early death.