are the Cheneys Mormons or related to Mormons?
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Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of Marjorie Lorraine (nĂŠe Dickey) and Richard Herbert Cheney. He is of predominantly English and Welsh ancestry; Cheney's 8th great-grandfather, William Cheney immigrated from England to Massachusetts in the 17th century. Although not a direct descendant, he is collaterally related to Benjamin Pierce Cheney (1815â1895), the early American expressman. Cheney is a distant cousin of both Harry S. Truman and Barack Obama; the three share a common ancestor in Mareen Duvall, a Huguenot who fled from France to England in the 17th century and later settled in Maryland. His father was a soil conservation agent for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and his mother was a softball star in the 1930s; Cheney was one of three children.
He attended Calvert Elementary School before his family moved to Casper, Wyoming, where he attended Natrona County High School.
Cheneyâs Family History
Lynne Cheney grew up in Wyoming and married her high-school sweetheart. When she recently started to look into family history, she found a lot she didnât know.
Written by Leslie Milk
| Published on October 1, 2007
âItâs a privilege to live in Washington if youâre interested in family history,â says Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney. When she decided to trace her family background for her new book, Blue Skies, No Fences: A Memoir of Childhood and Family, she found unexpected treasures in the National Archives, the Maryland State Archives, and the library of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Lynne Cheneyâs forebear Nicholas Leyberger arrived in Philadelphia from Germany in 1739, and she was able to find material about him in the DAR library. It has nearly 30,000 family histories as well as church records and letters.
Cheney says what she found helped her âflesh out the storiesâ of her familyâs early years. A Leyberger grandson, also named Nicholas, testified about his Revolutionary War experiences to prove he was a veteran. âSeeing your ancestorâs words is a remarkable experience,â she says.
But it was more recent family history that sparked Cheneyâs interest in her roots. When she was growing up in Casper, Wyoming, her maternal aunts shared âbits and piecesâ of family loreâincluding that her grandparents had lived in a cave and the family moved from there into a tent in the oil fields.
The âcave,â a shelter dug out of the side of a hill, was temporary. The tent was home long enough to get a nicknameâLybyer Mansion. (Nicholas Leybergerâs great-grandson Daniel had shortened the family name to Lybyer.) The âmansionâ had two rooms and housed the family of six plus a dog and Lynne Cheneyâs great-uncle Clyde.
âIt struck me as so exotic,â Cheney says. âAs an adult, I more fully appreciate the hardships this life meant.â
Her fatherâs family, the Vincents, were descendants of Mormons who had traveled from Wales to the New World and settled in Utah. Cheneyâs father wanted no part of the church or ancestors who lived by its precepts, so there were few childhood tales about her paternal history. But the Lybyers had rich stories.
Cheney knew that her grandfather Ben Lybyer had grown up on a farm in Missouri as one of 18 children. He ran away from home at age 13 and eventually got to Wyoming. He and several of his brothers, who later joined him there, talked about their escape from the backbreaking labor their father demanded.
At the National Archives, she found her great-grandfather Andrew Lybyerâs Civil War enlistment papers. âThey told me what he looked like and that he was âentirely soberâ when he enlisted,â Cheney says. The archives also held Lybyerâs Civil War pension records.
As a private in the Union Armyâs Sixth Indiana Cavalry, Lybyer was sent to defend Knoxville, Tennessee, then under siege by Confederate forces. His company was driven into the mountains, âwhere they had to survive in freezing weather without tents, blankets, or rations,â Cheney writes in her book. Her great-grandfather got very sick and, according to his pension file, never fully recovered. âHe probably worked his sons so hard because he couldnât do it himself,â Cheney says.
While researching, Cheney learned that the National Building Museum was originally the Pension Building, housing the federal agency that handled Civil War pensions.
In the early 1880s, Cheneyâs great-grandfather moved west to Missouri to take advantage of the Homestead Act, which gave citizens the right to claim 160-acre plots of public land. In the National Archives, Cheney found the homestead file describing the land and the farmhouse where her grandfather was born.
Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein has made the archives much more user-friendly for genealogy researchers, according to Cheney. Many of its documents are now available on the Internet.
>Cheneyâs Family History
The Maryland State Archives in Annapolis proved to be a trove of information about the Vice Presidentâs family. The Cheney family knew that William Cheney was among the Puritans who had come to America in 1640 and settled in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Nine generations later, Dick Cheneyâs grandparents, Thomas Cheney and Margaret Tyler, married in Nebraska. In 1915, they had a son they named Richard.
Margaret Tyler was a serious student of genealogy. Lynne Cheney writes: âItâs possible that she knew the surprising fact that her son was descended from Cheneys not only on her husbandâs side but on hers as well.â
It was Tylerâs ancestor Richard Cheney who had come to Maryland before 1660 and received a land grant from Lord Baltimore. There are still places in Maryland that bear his name: Cheneyâs Hill, Cheneyâs Resolution, and Cheneyâs Purchase. State archivist Edward Papenfuse helped Lynne Cheney locate the original grant, recorded in beautiful handwriting in a book kept by Lord Baltimore himself in the Maryland archives.
She also found that Richard had daughters named Elizabeth and Mary. The archive has Elizabethâs testimony in a legal proceeding about her fatherâs estate.
Coincidentally, Vice President Richard Cheneyâs daughters are named Elizabeth and Mary. The Cheneys now spend a lot of time at their home on Marylandâs Eastern Shore.
Genealogy is âhistory from the bottom up,â Cheney says. Her research helped put larger issues into perspective: âI never understood William Jennings Bryanâs âcross of goldâ speech until I read about one of Dickâs ancestors.â
Civil War veteran Samuel Cheneyâs farm suffered from a devastating drought in 1890. He needed a loan to finance a new crop, but banks werenât lending. The gold standard made it hard for small farmers to borrow money, Cheney writes: âWhen Bryan brought the crowd at the 1896 Chicago convention to its feet by declaring, âYou shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,â he had in mind farmers like Samuel.â
She didnât find any famous ancestors in researching Blue Skies, No Fences. What she found was a greater understanding of the people who had come beforeâwho shared the idea not just of getting by but of making life better for their children.
âMy mother grew up in the oil fields,â Cheney says, âbut she was determined that there would be no limits on my aspirations or my brothersâ.â
https://www.washingtonian.com/2007/10/01/cheneys-family-history/
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