John's immediate relatives including parents, siblings, partnerships and children in the Geissel family tree.

John's Family

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Refresh this page to see various historical events that occurred during John's lifetime.

In 1838, in the year that John C Geissel was born, on February 24th, Representatives William J. Graves (Kentucky) and Jonathan Cilley (Maine) fought a duel with rifles. They faced off at 94 yards. Cilley was hit on Graves' third try - in the femoral artery - and bled to death on the dueling field. The Panic of 1837 and Jackson's presidency had caused an extremely partisan Congress and the duel was a result.

In 1849, at the age of just 11 years old, John was alive when on January 23rd, British-born Elizabeth Blackwell became a doctor in the U.S. She earned a medical degree at the Geneva Medical College in New York. Blackwell was the first female doctor with a degree in the U.S.

In 1864, John was 26 years old when on October 5th, a cyclone killed 70,000 people in Calcutta, India. Calcutta is in a "very high damage risk" cyclone zone, although this was an especially powerful one.

In 1890, John was 52 years old when on January 2nd, Alice Sanger became the first female staffer to work in the White House. She was hired as a stenographer and, as such, took dictation.

In 1911, in the year of John C Geissel's passing, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire occurred, one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history. 146 workers (123 women and 23 men, many of them recent Jewish and Italian immigrants) died from the fire or by jumping to escape the fire and smoke. The garment factory was on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of a building in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. Doors to stairwells and exits had been locked in order to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to prevent theft, so they couldn't escape by normal means when the fire broke out. Due to the disaster, legislation was passed to protect sweatshop workers.