My Relationship to John Dodge

Richard E. Haskell

For most of my 46 years as an engineering professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, my corner, first-floor office was in the Dodge Hall of Engineering, built in 1968, two years after I arrived. The building was named for John Dodge, founder of the Dodge Brothers Motor Company with his brother, Horace, and the first husband of Matilda Wilson, who gave fourteen hundred acres of her Meadow Brook Farm to the State of Michigan in 1957 to establish Oakland University. I first met Matilda Wilson in the fall of 1966, when she hosted a cocktail party for the faculty at Meadow Brook Hall, the 100-room mansion on campus where she lived.

Dodge Hall of Engineering

John Francis Dodge (c. 1920)

Matilda Wilson in front of Meadow Brook Hall

Little did I know I was related to John Dodge through twelve different pedigree lines. I asked the HFA ChatGPT whether John Dodge descended from one of the two immigrant Dodge brothers, William or Richard. It quickly determined that John Dodge descended from William. Through an extended back-and-forth, we determined that I was related to John Dodge through twelve lines.

ChatGPT suggested that this would make a good article for the Haskell Journal and recommended making the centerpiece a one-page graphical pedigree showing all 12 paths in color. I asked whether it could produce such a one-page graphical pedigree in color. Within a minute, it produced the following chart.