Presidential descendants gather at Truman’s winter White House in Key West

Presidential family names are still being argued over, not just preserved, at Harry S. Truman’s Little White House in Key West. The annual Presidents Day gathering there brought together direct descendants of U.S. presidents, scholars and friends, and by 2025 the Society of Presidential Descendants said it had grown to 75 direct descendants from 26 presidents.

The setting was as pointed as the guest list. The Harry S. Truman Little White House is Florida’s only presidential museum, and Truman used it for 11 working vacations during his 1945-1953 presidency. That history gave the descendants a place to talk about what survives after a presidency ends: family memory, public ceremony and the parts of an inheritance that do not fit neatly into schoolbook portraits.

Clifton Truman Daniel, Truman’s grandson, described the task in two parts: preserving, promoting and defending an ancestor’s legacy, while also making a name for oneself. Tweed Roosevelt, another descendant in the mix, said he learned early that a famous surname brought extra scrutiny and expectation. Their comments captured the tension at the center of the gathering, where pride in a presidential line sits beside the burden of defending policies, decisions and reputations that remain contested.

The group’s own history shows how that balance has become more organized over time. The first such gathering cited in the story began in 2010 with Margaret Hoover, Herbert Hoover’s great-granddaughter, and her husband. Susan Ford and Luci Baines Johnson joined the next year, and the Society said it had met annually since 2018. The organization describes itself as a forum for direct descendants of one or more presidents, scholars and friends who support the study of the American presidency.

The descendants are not only meeting in museums and historic homes. The Society’s 2026 annual gathering was scheduled for June 3-5 at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, a sign that these family networks now move through presidential institutions as well as private lineage. That public-facing role extends the conversation beyond nostalgia, using descendants as guides to civic education, museum programming and the political meanings attached to old names.

The roster of names underscores how long presidential memory can travel. William McKinley, the 25th president, served from 1897 until his assassination in 1901 and led the United States through the Spanish-American War and an era of expansionism. Herbert Hoover served as the 31st president from 1929 to 1933. Massee McKinley, identified as Grover Cleveland’s great-great-grandson and also related to William McKinley, now serves as cofounder, vice president and chief of staff of the Society of Presidential Descendants and co-chair of the National First Ladies Day Commission.