Among the salesmen on lower Broadway, to possess a great-great-grandfather is unusual, even a great-grandfather is a rarity, and either is considered superfluous.

But to David the possession of a great-great-grandfather was a precious and open delight.
He had possessed him only for a short time.

Undoubtedly he always had existed, but it was not until David's sister Anne married a doctor in Bordentown, New Jersey, and became socially ambitious, that David emerged as a Son of Washington.
It was sister Anne, anxious to "get in" as a "Daughter" and wear a distaff pin in her shirtwaist, who discovered the revolutionary ancestor.

She unearthed him, or rather ran him to earth, in the graveyard of the Presbyterian church at Bordentown.

He was no less a person than General Hiram Greene, and he had fought with Washington at Trenton and at Princeton.