Mary Alice Kelly

Kelly and her family were visiting an Abraham Lincoln museum in Springfield, Ill., several years ago, when they noticed a portrait of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln.

What she saw, made her stop short.

“My father wondered what my picture was doing there,” she said, laughing.

“The funny thing is, I look just like her,” Kelly said. “My grandmother did, too.”

Kelly’s paternal grandmother was born Beulah Mae Todd, the daughter of Jonas Todd. As family research has shown, Beulah Mae was a granddaughter to one of Mary Todd Lincoln’s brothers, making Kelly’s grandmother a great-niece to Mary Todd Lincoln.

Mary Todd Lincoln (Photo courtesy of history1800s.about.com)

“We’re not really exactly sure who her grandfather was, but my father’s family came from Iowa and my grandparents, her parents are buried in Jefferson City,” Kelly said.

The mystery, then, is, which brother Kelly’s family is descended from. The family has narrowed it down to three possibilities but, as often happens with genealogy research, the record gets fuzzy from there.

“Each one of them had so many children, it’s difficult to know and there are so many repeated names,” Kelly said.

Kelly briefly outlined the experiences of her relative and some of the disappointments she had while in the White House.

“She was really expecting, when she came to Washington, to just walk in and be the head of the social scene,” Kelly said. “And when they snubbed her like they did and treated her like a country bumpkin, it was something she never expected. She’d been the top of the social scene in Illinois and Kentucky and Missouri.”

Mary Todd Lincoln (Photo courtesy of nps.gov)

Kelly added, “It wasn’t because she lacked the graces. It was snobbishness. She came from the West and that was the attitude.”

Kelly also noted that Mary Todd Lincoln was the first college-educated wife of a U.S. President.

“She actually had a college education,” Kelly said. “In fact, Lincoln was almost forced into a duel because of something she wrote in a newspaper.”

When it comes to family research, Kelly’s online tools of choice are Ancestry.com and Rootsweb, both popular among genealogists. She also uses software to build her family tree from her research.

“I would encourage anyone to look, but to realize that’s the past, not the present,” she said.

As far as whether having a famous relative has gone to Kelly’s head, rest assured, she said, it has not.

“I don’t think too much about the relationship,” she said. “I don’t want people to think I’ve got a big head. It’s much more important to be ourselves.”