Thursday, October 19, 2006

Good luck to Jacob and Emily

There is a fascinating article at Yahoo news titled "The Multimillion Dollar Inheritance, Left in 1917 By Californian Gold Miner to His Future Smartest Great-Great-Grandchild, Still Waits for the Winner." The information apparently comes from www.SixGenerations.com.

The situation:
Henry Smith, who made his fortune by discovering gold in California during the Gold Rush and his future investments, signed his will in 1917 at the age of 86. With an unusual precision, he left his 35-year-old son George without the money. Smith was angry that his son was not married, did not have siblings, and was planning to join the United States Army in the battlefield in Europe during WWI, where he could be possibly killed.

Instead, he signed his inheritance to some unknown great-great-grandchild, to be born in the future, and he died shortly afterward. That made his son change his mind, marry soon, have a son named James, and manage the destiny of his other siblings, so they would keep the family dynasty alive for another three generations in order to get the inheritance.

The family line almost stopped when James's only son David was killed in Vietnam in 1964. His father was forced to remarry, and at the age of 47 he and his new wife Mary had another son, Michael. Michael, now 40, and his wife Jennifer, have two children, Emily, 17, and Jacob, 16, who are the straight heirs of their great-great-grandfather Henry.

The judicial problem with selecting the right heir for billion-dollar assets is that even though the children have agreed to share the money equally, they still must compete with each other, because legally the inheritance should be given to only one: the smartest child.

Read the whole article.

Emily and Jacob must square off to find the "smartest heir" - presumably by winning the chess-style card game called "The Heirs" created by Six Generations, Inc., and described at http://www.sixgenerations.com/. I sure hope their parents taught them to share.

My cursory reading of the SixGen web site is that this game sounds like a lot of fun, and perhaps could be used by families, or even genealogy societies, to teach genealogy principles and family relationships.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you, Randy. I also hope, that "Six Generations" cards will be useful for the genealogists. The following development is under way already.
The Texas State Genealogical Society will hold its 46th Annual Conference on October 27th and 28th, 2006 at the MacGorman Conference Center, 1702 W. Boyce Ave., Fort Worth, Texas.
They will be using "Six Generations" card games as the door prizes. I am thankful for an idea to bring "Six Generations" to the conference to Judy Knight, President Elect and Conference Chair of Texas State Genealogical Society.
This year's event, "Road to the Past - A Map to Your Family History," will feature well-known genealogists J. Mark Lowe, CG, and Pamela Boyer Porter, CRCG, CG. Approximately 250 genealogists and historians will be attending this meeting.
For more information about this conference, contact Judy Knight at (817) 419-8283, or email jwk45@sbcglobal.net . == Fyodor Soloview,
Publisher Six Generations Card Games