Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

popular name: Brigadier General Albert Myer

date_of_death: August 24, 1880

age: 51

cause_of_death: Kidney disease

claim_to_fame: Historical Figure

best_know_for: Albert Myers was a surgeon, a general, father of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, inventor of wig-wag signaling (or aerial telegraphy), and also was the founder of the U.S. Weather Bureau

popular name: Rosemary Kennedy

date_of_death: January 7, 2005

age: 86

cause_of_death: Natural causes

claim_to_fame: Historical Figure

best_know_for: Rosemary Kennedy was the third child and eldest daughter of Joseph and Rose Kennedy and her brothers included future president John F. Kennedy. She was slower to crawl, slower to walk and to speak than her brothers and she reportedly displayed developmental delays from an early age after a bungled delivery led to oxygen deprivation. Despite her apparent intellectual disabilities, Rosemary participated in most family activities. In the diary she kept as a teenager she described people she met, dances and concerts she attended, and a visit to the Roosevelt White House. When her father was appointed US Ambassador to Britain in 1938, Rosemary went to live in London and was presented at court along with her mother and sister Kathleen. Upon return to the states she allegedly exhibited mood swings and disruptive behavior. Fearing Rosemary would be an embarrassment and roadblock for his male offspring to achieve great power at all political levels, without telling anyone Joseph instructed Dr. James W. Watts to perform a frontal lobotomy. The horrifying surgical procedure – which involved severing the connection between the frontal lobe and other parts of the brain – became popular in the 1940s and 1950s with American and British doctors who claimed to be seeking a ‘cure’ for patients with certain mental health conditions that were deemed socially unacceptable. When they completed the surgical procedure, It quickly became apparent that the procedure had caused immense harm. Kennedy's mental capacity diminished to that of a two-year-old child. She could not walk or speak intelligibly and was incontinent. For the next six decades she was housed at a facility in Ohio, hidden from view and rarely spoken of until she died at the age of 86.

popular name: George Pickett

date_of_death: July 30, 1875

age: 50

cause_of_death: Liver disease

claim_to_fame: Historical Figure

best_know_for: Major General George Pickett was a career United States Army officer who became a major general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. He attended the US Military Academy at West Point, accumulating a host of demerits and graduating last in his class in 1846 (as did General George Armstrong Custer in 1861). Pickett’s classmates included Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson and George B. McClellan. He is best remembered for being one of the commanders at Pickett's Charge, the futile and bloody Confederate offensive on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg that bears his name and the wholesale execution of 22 soldiers (including a 15-year-old boy). A broken man after the war, his reputation was thoroughly rehabilitated and sanitized after his death by his third wife, LaSalle Corbell Pickett, whose writings turned the often incompetent general into an idealized “Lost Cause” hero.