Each spring when the horse-racing world turns its eye to Louisville and the Kentucky Derby, I can’t help but reminisce about a trip I took there a decade ago to ferret out my family’s murky past. One of the key places on my list was Calumet Farm, above (courtesy of LIFE), the epitome of Bluegrass culture, synonymous with some of the most famous thoroughbred racehorses in history: Whirlaway and Citation. Ironically, in 1992, when Henryk deKwiatkowski purchased Calumet Farm at public auction, Quest asked me to interview him. At the time, I had no idea that distant ancestors of mine had once lived there.

What was my connection to this legendary stable? Well, it’s a bit convoluted. My mother Muriel Reno Peters died in 1993, leaving behind some scrapbooks belonging to her father Leonard Minor Reno, a noted aviator in the First World War. While perusing these diaries and photographs, I kept noticing pictures of him at a horse farm of some sort. No details were given. But as I began the slow and often difficult process of putting the pieces of his family tree together, I discovered that his mother, Linnie Daniel Reno, was the sister of Georgia Daniel Wright. Georgia had married the founder of Calumet Farm, William Monroe Wright. The two families were very tight and often traveled together.

Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1851 (although a passport I found states 1848), he first married Clara Lee Morrison of New York, and had a son, Warren Wright. A “kindly soul”, according to newspaper accounts, William was also an extremely savvy businessman. In the 1890s, he founded Calumet Baking Powder, which proved to be immensely popular with the growing middle class which still made its own biscuits at home. As his wealth increased, he poured his good fortune into real estate and horses.

In 1924 Wright bought the old 1,200 acre Fairland Farm in Lexington, on Versailles Pike, and renamed it after his firm, Calumet. He moved his family and started raising Standardbreds. In 1928, the Wrights sold their interest in the baking powder company to General Foods for $32 million and then turned their full attention to Calumet Farm and breeding champion trotters. Wright’s horse Calumet Butler won the Hambletonian Trotting Classic in 1931, but old man Wright by then was too sick to celebrate.

When William Wright died a month later, at the height of the Depression, he left an estate valued at $60 million. His son Warren inherited $55 million of that and went on to establish Calumet Farm as the premier Thoroughbred-producing stable of its time. My grandfather’s aunt Georgia, as Wright’s widow, was left a generous annual stipend and the right to live at the farm until her death. Sadly, she didn’t live much longer. She had a heart attack in 1936, leaving her stake in the fortune to her daughter, Lucile Page, also from a previous marriage. Sometime in the 1970s, when Lucile Page died, she left my mother a small bequest. None of us at the time knew where the money came from. But clearly it must have come from all those cans of Calumet Baking Powder.

The more I delved into Georgia Daniel Wright, above, and her own obscure roots, the more intrigued I became by my ancestry. Genealogy is one of those pastimes that only appeal to the person performing them. Eyes roll and jaws yawn the moment one brings it up to others. But I was determined to find out more about the Daniel clan and how these two sisters from the backwoods of Tennessee had risen to such heights.

Finding out anything about them was difficult and time-consuming. But eventually I was able to locate death certificates, passport applications, and census records that helped me contrive a spotty but accurate picture. Georgia and Linnie were the daughters of George W. Daniel and Mary Elizabeth Gardner of Weakley County, Tennessee, both of whom were born in the 1830s. Georgia was born in Bonham, Texas in 1861 when her father was stationed at Fort Concho, below, as a surgeon with the Confederate Army. Whether he was enlisted or not, I have not been able to ascertain. They stayed in Texas for a few years, then went back to Weakley County where Linnie was born, and eventually moved to Arkansas.

From there the trail grows cold until Linnie turns up married to Harry Otho Reno, below, in Jonesboro in 1893. Harry had started out as a bellhop at the posh old Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs and was nicknamed “Hot Springs Harry” by his pals. He bought one of the local papers and became a successful newspaperman. Eventually the Renos resettled in Chicago where he founded the H. O. Reno Co., a publishing firm which put out Furniture Age, a trade journal. An avid horseman, Reno most likely introduced his wife’s sister Georgia to William Monroe Wright while attending some horse-related event. The Wrights were married in 1897.

Since discovering these various links, I’ve traveled down to Gardner Station, Tennessee where my Gardner ancestors were from and traced their roots back to the early 1600s in Virginia, although there are some gaps in the Gardner tree that make it difficult to be absolutely certain. If some of these trees I’ve found are true, then I am not only related to Davy Crockett, but the infamous Bell Witch! From there I ventured north and east to Louisville and Lexington, and stopped off for good measure in Lawrenceburg where my father, who ran Austin, Nichols, & Co. used to make Wild Turkey bourbon!

I had less luck with the Daniel clan. George W. Daniel’s father James M. Daniel proved difficult to trace. He seems to have come out of North Carolina and died in 1836 in Weakley County. His wife Susan then appears to have married a much younger man named Josiah Carney and settled in Graves County, Kentucky, leaving her grown children to fend for themselves. It’s all based on census records, which are notoriously unreliable, and I’ve had to challenge some of the claims made by genealogists who have mistaken my Susan Carney with others, thereby muddying the waters further. But I’m pretty sure that I have the right couple as Graves County is just over the border from Weakley. I’d welcome any input from anyone out there taking notice.

Where does all this genealogical digging get me? Well, in the case of the Daniels, it led me to a branch of the family, descended from Georgia’s brothers, who lived in Texas and became multimillionaires in the oil business, via the Daniel Orifice Company. I’m hoping some day that one of them will leave me a fortune. And then there are the Gardners, some of whom I’ve befriended online and actually visited with in Tennessee. It’s fun to find out one has distant cousins. They have all the advantages of relatives but none of the downsides. They don’t expect presents on their birthdays.