John Jacob Astor
America's First Multimillionaire
Chapter One
The Hard Years
At a time when most people lived and died within a
hundred miles of where they were born, John Jacob
Astor's birth in the German territory of the margrave
of Baden-Baden was almost accidental. The Astors—the
name was variously spelled Astore and Aoster—were
Italian Protestants from the Alpine village of Chiavenna
high above the northern end of Lake Como. A medieval ancestor
was supposed to have been Pedro de Astorga, a knight
from León, in northwestern Spain, whose coat of arms featured
a goshawk—azor in Spanish—and who was killed
in Jerusalem on the Fourth Crusade in 1203. Tracing the
lineage back to the Castilian grandee was the genealogical
handiwork of John Jacob's great-grandson, William Waldorf
Astor, when the latter pressed his case for British peerage.
The first documented ancestor is Jean-Jacques d'Astorg,
who embraced the Reformation. He and his family are assumed
to have been followers of the persecuted Walden ... read full excerpt from John Jacob Astor: America's First Multimillionaire ebook
