American inventor ancestors: the makers in your family tree

Inventors leave an unusual documentary trail: patents are dated, witnessed, and permanent public records, which makes the people behind them easier to place in time and space than most nineteenth-century Americans.

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The short version

Why patents help: A patent fixes a person to a date and usually a place, in a permanent public record.
The 1836 fire: A fire destroyed the Patent Office records; earlier patents survive only where they were reconstructed.
Under-recorded inventors: Coverture stripped married women of the right to contract and hold property, so their inventions were often filed under a husband's name. Enslaved people were held to be non-citizens and denied patents outright.
Where lines concentrate: New England and the mid-Atlantic, the centers of early American manufacturing.

What the patent record does and does not capture

A patent is a genealogist's gift: a dated public document naming a person, usually giving a residence, and frequently naming witnesses who turn out to be relatives or neighbors. For nineteenth-century American research, that combination of date, place, and associated names is often more precise than anything else available for the same person.

The record has real gaps. A fire destroyed the Patent Office's holdings in 1836, and patents issued before that date survive only where they were subsequently reconstructed from other copies. Anything appearing to predate 1836 should be treated accordingly.

More importantly, the patent record reflects who was permitted to hold property and enter contracts. Federal law never barred women from patenting — Mary Kies received one in 1809 — but coverture meant a married woman in most states could not own, license, or manufacture what she patented, so inventions were routinely filed under a husband's name instead. For enslaved inventors the exclusion was flat: an 1858 ruling held that an enslaved man could not receive a patent because he was not a citizen, and that the man who enslaved him could not receive it either because he was not the inventor. Their work is not so much misattributed in the record as missing from it. An ancestor absent from the patent record is not necessarily an ancestor who invented nothing.

Inventors in the catalog

American inventors and innovators with documented descendant lines in the shared FamilySearch tree.

Thomas Jefferson
1743 – 1826Signed the Declaration
Drafted and signed the Declaration, designed a "moldboard of least resistance" plow, and sat on the first federal patent board without ever patenting it; his line runs through daughters Martha and Mary, with a separately documented Hemings line.
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Albert Einstein
1879 – 1955
Physicist who with Leo Szilard patented a refrigerator with no moving parts, US Patent 1,781,541 in 1930, while living in Berlin; he settled at Princeton in 1933 and became a US citizen in 1940.
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Alexander Graham Bell
1847 – 1922US Patent 174,465 (1876)
Boston teacher of elocution and of deaf students who received US Patent 174,465 for the telephone on March 7, 1876, and later worked in Washington and Nova Scotia.
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Angelina J. Knox
1819 – 1896Married woman patentee, 1865
Boston abolitionist who on February 7, 1865 received US Patent 46,247 for a process to preserve natural flowers, taking the patent in her own name while married.
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Betsey Metcalf Baker
1786 – 1867Declined to patent
Providence girl who about 1798, aged twelve, worked out a seven-strand straw braid for bonnets and refused to patent it, saying she did not want her name sent to Congress.
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Caleb Bradham
1867 – 1934
New Bern, North Carolina pharmacist who mixed "Brad's Drink" in 1893, renamed it Pepsi-Cola in 1898, and registered it as a trademark, not a patent, in 1903.
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Charles Browne Fleet
1843 – 1916
Lynchburg, Virginia pharmacist who made an early lip balm in the 1880s and sold the rights for five dollars in 1912 to John Morton, whose family marketed it as ChapStick.
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Charles Courtice Alderton
1857 – 1941
Pharmacist at Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store in Waco, Texas who mixed the drink first sold on December 1, 1885 as Dr Pepper; he never patented it and sold the recipe.
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Charles Goodyear
1800 – 1860US Patent 3,633 (1844)
Connecticut hardware merchant who found the rubber vulcanization process at Woburn, Massachusetts in 1839 and patented it as US Patent 3,633 on June 15, 1844.
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David Rittenhouse
1732 – 1796First US Mint director
Philadelphia clockmaker and astronomer who built celebrated orreries about 1770, used spider thread for telescope crosshairs, and made the first known diffraction grating in 1785.
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Showing the 10 best-known of 103 in this category. A tree search checks your lines against all 103.

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How to trace an inventor ancestor

Patents anchor a person precisely, which makes the surrounding research easier.

1
Use the patent as a fixed point
A patent gives you a name, a date, and usually a place. That is a firm anchor to build census, land, and vital record research around.
2
Read the witnesses
Patent witnesses were often relatives, business partners, or close neighbors. The names alongside your ancestor's are frequently research leads in themselves.
3
Allow for the 1836 gap
Records before the Patent Office fire survive only where reconstructed. A missing early patent may reflect the fire rather than the absence of an invention.
4
Look past whose name is on it
Where a married woman did the inventing, the patent often bears her husband's name — coverture made that the only workable arrangement. Where an enslaved person did, there is usually no patent at all. Family tradition about who really made something can be right even when the paperwork is silent or disagrees.

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If an inventor turns up

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When Rememberkin finds an inventor in your tree, it can print the whole line — every generation between you and them, with names, dates, and portraits.

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Every generation between you and them, documented
The relationship named plainly — 2nd-great-granduncle, stated plainly
Printed as a wall chart or bound into your family book

Questions people ask

How do I find out if I'm related to a famous inventor?

Trace your line back to the nineteenth century and look for overlap in place and family name with a documented inventor's family. Patents anchor inventors precisely in time and place, which makes testing a proposed connection more straightforward than for most people of the same era.

Are old patent records useful for genealogy?

Very. A patent names a person, gives a date, usually records a residence, and names witnesses who are often relatives or neighbors. For nineteenth-century American research that combination is frequently more precise than any other single record.

Why are some early patents missing?

A fire destroyed the Patent Office's records in 1836. Patents issued before that date survive only where they were later reconstructed from copies held elsewhere, so coverage of the earliest American patents is incomplete.

Were women able to patent their own inventions?

Legally, yes — the patent statute was never restricted by sex, and Mary Kies received one in 1809. In practice, coverture prevented married women in most states from owning, licensing, or manufacturing what they patented, so inventions were commonly filed under a husband's name instead. Enslaved people were denied patents outright as non-citizens, and an 1858 ruling denied them to enslavers too, on the grounds that they were not the inventors.

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