She was always strongly interested in the ancestry of the house.

She traced her own line back to the Lambtons of Durham, England--a family which had been occupying broad lands there since Saxon times.

I am not sure, but I think that those Lambtons got along without titles of nobility for eight or nine hundred years, then produced a great man, three-quarters of a century ago, and broke into the peerage.
My mother knew all about the Clemenses of Virginia, and loved to aggrandize them to me, but she has long been dead.

There has been no one to keep those details fresh in my memory, and they have grown dim.
There was a Jere.

Clemens who was a United States Senator, and in his day enjoyed the usual Senatorial fame--a fame which perishes whether it spring from four years' service or forty.