It was an ordinary day. President's Day, 2022 and Lancaster County residents had the chance to once again remember one of our Presidents whose ancestors came from nearby Salisbury Township. President Richard Milhous Nixon was a Quaker from Salisbury Township whose relatives on both sides of his family were mostly Quakers. President Nixon's late father, Francis Anthony Nixon died in 1956. Francis Nixon's great-great grandmother was born in Salisbury Township. Jane McIlvaine was President's Nixon's distant grandmother who was also born in Salisbury Township and resided there until 1773. She then moved to what is now Juniata County where she married Paul Trimer in 1780. Research also showed that former President Nixon's great-grandfather was killed in the Battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. His name was George Nixon who served as a private with Company B, 73rd Regiment, Ohio Infantry. He is buried in Gettysburg National Cemetery, close to the spot where Abraham Lincoln gave his famous dedicatory address a few month later. His cemetery marker reads: GEORGE NIXON CO. B REGT. 73. Ninety years later on July 5, 1953 his great grandson, Richard Nixon, visited the grave. Lancaster County Historical Society has traced Nixon's family tree back to his sixth-generation grandparents. Nixon's 4X great grandparents, Robert and Isabel McIlvaine, were laid to rest in Upper Octorara Cemetery in Sadsbury Township, Center County, PA. Their son Moses, Nixon's great-grandfather died at Gettysburg, his widow moved to Ohio where her son, Samuel Brady Nixon, married. His marriage to Sarah Ann Wadsworth bore a son, Francis Anthony Nixon, the president's father, who moved from Ohio to California in 1907. Richard M. Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California in 1913. His father, a farmer, returned East in 1947, settling in nearby York county where he farmed until 1951. He injured his arm in a fall, thus ending his farming days. He returned to California where he died in August of 1956. Richard Milhous Nixon came to prominence as a representative and senator from California. He served as Vice President from 1953 to 1961 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower and waged an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1960, narrowly losing to John F. Kennedy. In 1962 he lost a race for governor of California. Nixon ran for the presidency again in 1968 and was elected the 37th President of the United State, serving from 1969 until 1974 when I remember him leaving the White House, flashing his usual signal with his two fingers as the helicopter rose above the White House never to return with Nixon on it again.
He had resigned as President of the United States! It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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