Slightly morbid US/POTUS history trivia question (no googling etc):

[RockRaven]

Preface: I was just reading a book about a POTUS and it mentioned one of his kids dying while he was in office. That anecdote was well known to me, but made me curious how many others it happened to. I could only think of one other, but I looked it up and found 4 in total.

So... and sorry if you find this morbid or distasteful as trivia, but I think it is interesting because some of them affected the presidency in question or society at large:

Can you name the US Presidents who have lost a child while in office? Also the child's name, age, circumstances.



Bonus question: name the one POTUS who lost a child after election day but prior to inauguration day (so not quite in office), also plus details.

[Grins]

1. Tough...

Only came up with Lincoln and Kennedy.

[RockRaven]

2. Those are correct (were also the two I had at my fingertips). nt

[lastlib]

3. Franklin Pierce is the bonus answer, though I'm foggy on details....

I think Coolidge lost his son while in office. Beyond that, IDK.

[RockRaven]

4. Both are correct. Well done.

The Pierce story is particularly tragic and dramatic. I'll not say more at the moment in case someone else wants to post to claim credit for knowing the details off the top of their head.

[LeftInTX]

5. Kennedy: Patrick born premature 1963.

Obviously he was president at the time.

Don't know enough about others, with the exception of Lincoln. I'm sure numerous lost kids, but it wasn't all that big of a deal before antibiotics.
Did any of the Roosevelts lose kids?

[RockRaven]

6. I think that counts as a full/correct answer for Kennedy. As for Roosevelts,

TR and FDR both lost children during their lifetime, but no, neither whilst POTUS.

TR's youngest son Quentin was KIA in WWI in 1918 (US Army Air Service), the only child of a POTUS ever KIA, a decade after TR left the WH and about a year before TR passed himself.

But another TR trivia nugget in this vein: Quentin's oldest full sibling, who is confusingly called either Theodore Jr or Theodore Roosevelt III, also died in service (though not in action) in Normandy in '44, about 5 weeks after D-Day, of a heart attack. IIRC he was the first US Army general to land on the beaches on D-Day, and he had to lobby hard to be allowed to go at all because his heart problems were known, and he had significant arthritis.

FDR lost a son in infancy in 1909, long before he was in the WH, named Franklin (different from the FDR Jr who was born later, after several other siblings).

[Fla Dem]

7. Three presidents lost their wives while in office.

Your questioned got me to wondering about First Ladies, so looked it up.

Three first ladies have died at the White House. Letitia Tyler died on September 10, 1842 following a stroke. Caroline Harrison died of tuberculosis on October 25, 1892. On August 6, 1914, Ellen Wilson passed away after battling Bright’s Disease.

https://www.whitehousehistory.org/questions/who-has-died-in-the-white-house