BREAKING NEWS: Barbara Bush, US Former First Lady Visits The Ancestors

Published by Acquah Solomon Kobina

Time: 03:57

Barbara Bush, the matriarch of an American political dynasty spanning decades who was the second American to be both the first lady and the mother of a president, died Tuesday. She was 92; Her death was confirmed by Jim McGrath, a spokesman for the Bush family.

A family spokesman said Sunday that Bush wouldn’t seek any further medical treatment after a series of recent hospitalizations.

Bush was married for 73 years to the nation’s 41st president, George H.W. Bush, and was the mother of the 43rd president, George W. Bush; another son, Jeb, is a former governor of Florida. She was considered an asset on the campaign trail, known for her wit and her emphasis on family

In the White House, beginning when her husband was vice president under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, she championed a push to raise national literacy, and expanded her efforts as first lady and supported the cause the rest of her life.
Bush described her literacy work as “the most important issue we have” and often said literacy was tied to other struggles families faced. She became the honorary chairwoman of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy and helped to promote literacy events across the country.

Bush was an energetic advocate for volunteerism, including causes such as homelessness, AIDS, the elderly and school volunteering programs.

“I hope people will say, ‘She cared; she worked hard for lots of causes,'” she told the Christian science monitor in 1989.
The only other woman to have been the wife and mother of a president was Abigail Adams, whose husband, John Adams, was the nation’s second president, and whose son, John Quincy Adams, the sixth.

Barbara Bush, born in New York in 1925 in Flushing, New York, was the third of four children of Marvin Pierce, later the publisher of Redbook and McCall’s, and Pauline Robinson Pierce. She was a distant cousin of President Franklin Pierce and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The Bushes were the longest-married couple in presidential history (Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were married one year later), and had six children: George, Robin, Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy.