Clinton family

Bill Clinton's father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr. (February 27, 1918 – May 17, 1946), was a traveling heavy equipment salesman who died in a car crash three months before Bill was born.[2] Blythe was born as one of nine children to William Jefferson Blythe Sr. (1884–1935), a poor farmer in Sherman, Texas, and his wife, the former Lou Birchie Ayers (1893–1946). He was of English and Scotch-Irish descent, with family lines in North America since the days of the Thirteen Colonies.[3][4][5]

Blythe was married four times. He married for the first time in December 1935, and the bride was Virginia Adele Gash; they were divorced only thirteen months later. Although no child was born to the couple during their marriage, they later had a son together. After the divorce, Virginia moved to California and married first a man named Coffelt, then a man named Charles Ritzenthaler. However, she and Blythe remained friends, and she visited him on occasion. A son was conceived during these visits, and Henry Leon Blythe was born in Sherman, Texas, on June 17, 1938, some eighteen months after his parents had been divorced. Henry's parents lost touch with each other when he was an infant, after his father briefly married and divorced his mother's sister, and he never knew his biological father or paternal siblings. Later in life, Henry Leon Blythe took the name "Henry Leon Ritzenthaler" in honor of a step-father. He ran several small businesses in Paradise, California, including a janitorial business, and died in 2009. He was unaware of his connection to the future president until the presidential campaign of 1992, when an investigation by The Washington Post, based on birth registry records, revealed details of Bill Clinton's family. Ritzenthaler met his half-brother for the first time around that time, and the physical resemblance between them was remarked upon.[6]

Blythe's second marriage happened in December 1940 when, nearly four years after his divorce from Virginia Adele Gash, Blythe married her sister, Minnie Faye Gash. This marriage was annulled only four months later, in April 1941, and there were no children. Barely days after the annulment, on May 3, 1941, Blythe married again. His third wife was Wanetta Ellen Alexander of Kansas City, Missouri. Wanetta gave birth to Blythe's daughter on May 11, 1941, exactly eight days after their wedding. She had become pregnant with Blythe's child even before he had married Minnie Faye Gash in December 1940. The daughter thus born to Wanetta and Blythe is Sharon Lee Blythe Pettijohn, who died on April 24, 2022, aged 80.[7] Blythe and Wanetta were formally divorced three years later, in April 1944. They lost touch immediately afterwards; Wanetta, who eventually settled in Tucson, Arizona, had no inkling of Blythe's subsequent history until the presidential campaign of 1992 and the Washington Post story. Upon seeing old photographs of Bill Clinton's father flashed on TV, Wanetta "swears on a stack of Bibles ...... that that was the man she was married to" said her son-in-law Bob Pettijohn, Sharon Lee Blythe Pettijohn's husband.[8][9]

Blythe's divorce from Wanetta Alexander was granted by court in April 1944. Seven months before that, in September 1943, Blythe had already "married" Virginia Dell Cassidy of Bodcaw, Arkansas. Blythe and Cassidy remained married until his death in May 1946, which happened in a car crash. On August 19, 1946, three months after Blythe's death, Cassidy gave birth to their only child, the future Bill Clinton. Cassidy had no knowledge of Blythe's previous marriages until decades later.[10]

Bill Clinton's mother, Virginia Dell Cassidy was of Irish ancestry[11] (later Virginia Dell Blythe Clinton Dwire Kelley), she was born in Bodcaw, Arkansas on June 6, 1923. She was the only child of James Eldridge Cassidy (1898–1957), a grocer, by his wife Edith Grisham Cassidy (1901–1968), a nurse anesthetist. Bill Clinton's father, William J. Blythe, was her first husband, and she married him in September 1943, when she was 20 and he was 25 years old. On the day of their wedding, Blythe was still legally married to his third wife Wanetta; his divorce from her was finalized only in April the following year. However, Cassidy may not have known of this circumstance at that time, and certainly did not know of Blythe's first two marriages until decades after his death. After Blythe died, she moved back with her parents, gave birth to a son three months later, and named him William Jefferson Blythe III. This was the future Bill Clinton.

In 1950, four years after Blythe's death, the young widow married car salesman Roger Clinton Sr. (July 23, 1908 – November 8, 1967). Roger was born in Yell County, Arkansas, in July 1908 to Allen W. Clinton (August 26, 1880 – June 14, 1965) and Eula Cornwell Clinton (May 29, 1882 – October 10, 1975).[12] The marriage produced one child, the actor and musician Roger Clinton Jr., who was born in 1956 and is the only one of Bill Clinton's siblings to have been raised with him and have a close relationship with him. In 1962, Roger and Virginia Clinton suffered a crisis in their marriage; they got divorced and then remarried in quick succession within that year. At this time, the 16-year-old William Jefferson Blythe III officially adopted his step-father's surname as his own and took the name William Jefferson Clinton. Roger Clinton died in 1967 after seventeen years of marriage.

On January 3, 1969, only one year after Roger Clinton's death, his widow married for the third time. Her groom, Jeff Dwire (June 6, 1923 – August 1974), was the same age as she, and had three daughters by a previous marriage. After briefly serving in the military, he had worked as a carpenter, a hairdresser, a judo teacher and a football coach, and had run a string of small businesses, including building houses, dealing in oil-well equipment and selling financial securities. What alarmed Virginia's family and friends was the fact that he had served nine months in prison during 1962 for stock fraud. However, Bill Clinton was supportive of the new man in his mother's life; he served as Best Man and also played and sang at the wedding reception. The marriage, which produced no children, lasted until Dwire died in August 1974 from complications arising from diabetes.

In January 1982, Virginia Dwire married for the fourth and last time to Richard Kelley. This marriage, which produced no children, lasted until Virginia's death from breast cancer on January 6, 1994. In later life, Virginia was insistent that all official documents refer to her by her full and chosen name, "Virginia Dell Blythe Clinton Dwire Kelley."