For Genealogists and Cultural Historians

Cultural historians may one day wish to research the early astronauts. Here is a thumbnail sketch of Carpenter’s genealogy: An only child, Scott descends on his father’s side from the Rehoboth branch Carpenters and from the Landises, German-speaking Swiss Mennonites who married into the French-Huguenot Ruby and Frye families, which helped to settle Madison County, Iowa.

On his mother’s side Scott is descended from the Dutch Reformed Noxons of Upstate New York and from the Kelsos. Presbyterian Ulster Scots, the Kelsos migrated early in the 19th century from Livingston, New Jersey, to settle Franklin Co., Ohio, and then Daviess Co., Missouri. They were among the first families to arrive (June 1860) in the gold camps of Colorado, where they met the first physician in Idaho Springs, Dr. Abram Martin Noxon. Scott was raised in home of his maternal grandparents, Vic and Clara Noxon, in the university town of Boulder, Colo., then a city of five thousand—twice that when college was in session. He was christened (1925), confirmed (1938), and married (1948) by Father Hugh Walters at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder, where he had maintained a perfect Sunday School attendance record and also served as an acolyte.

His paternal grandparents Ruby and Marion E. Carpenter lived in Denver, Colo., then with a population of more than 300,000.

Scott is distantly related to both presidents Bush through common seventeenth-century forebears Benjamin and Renew (Weeks) Carpenter; one line produced Flora (née Sheldon) Bush, the mother of Sen. Prescott Sheldon Bush (R-Conn.), while another produced Scott through a succession of Carpenter sons. The connection with the Roosevelts is more distant: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a direct descendant, through Mary Rebecca Aspinwall, of Alice (née Carpenter) Southworth Bradford. Alice Bradford, William Carpenter (Rehoboth, Mass.), and William Carpenter (Providence, R.I.) were cousins and contemporaries in seventeenth-century New England.