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It's a sure sign that pop culture trumps tradition when Charleston's locals can tell you more about Midnight In The Garden of Good and Evil than they can recall of the Habershams, Tatnalls, Bullochs, and McIntoshes of Old Savannah. There was a time as recent as a century ago that Charlestonians referred to Savannah as "over home" and Savannahans as "cousins."

In the antebellum South few names compare with the Bullochs in evoking that moss-draped oak and wisteria romanticized image outsiders have come to expect.

In the 19th and early 20th century it was vogue for well-heeled New Yorkers and Connecticut Yankees to bag a trophy wife on one of their excursions down to Jekyll or Sapelo Islands. Theodore (Thee) Roosevelt, Sr., was not the first northern millionaire to come south for a bride.

For Thee Roosevelt, father of Teddy and grandfather of Eleanor, marrying into the Southern blueblood Bullochs of Savannah cemented his foothold with American aristocracy and untold wealth. Ironically, however, surnames such as Bulloch, Tatnall, and Habersham can't compare in ancient lineage with the cachet associated with van Rosenvelts in 17th century Amsterdam. The van Rosenvelts have been merchant princes since the 1600s, and their foresight put them into the New World just 7 years after the English settled Jamestown. Van Rosenvelts claimed mid-town Manhattan. Their patriarch built a mansion near where the Empire State Building towers today. Six generations later under the Anglicized name Roosevelt they united with the Savannah Bullochs to make a princely American dynasty.

Since Charleston as a colony had a three-generation headstart on Savannah, its quite common to find leading families from here migrating west to the new settlement.

The earliest Bulloch ancestor of Teddy Roosevelt to arrive on these shores was James Bulloch who immigrated sometime in the early 1720s. Most likely this young Scottish gentleman had been a part of "the Fifteen," the Jacobite Uprising of 1715, that fought unsuccessfully against the Hanovarian settlement that brought over from the Continent George I as the British monarch.

Hundreds of Scots migrated to the southern colonies between 1680 and 1720. One of these Scot enclaves was just south of Port Royal. James McClintock, John Buchanan, William Inglis, Gavin Black, Adam Allan, John Gait, Thomas Marshall, William Smith, Robert Urie, Thomas Bryce, John Syme, John Alexander, John Marshall, Matthew Machen, John Paton, John Gibson, John Young, Arthur Cunningham, George Smith, and George Dowart have descendants in the Carolinas and Georgia to this day.

However, one Scot, the Reverend Archibald Stobo of the Darien settlement on the Georgia coast, chose to return to Scotland with his family. When a gale off the Carolina coast dismasted their ship, the captain put into Charleston harbor for repairs.

Upon hearing that a Scottish divine was aboard, several Presbyterian Meeting Houses sent word that they desired him to come preach to them. The Scots Presbyterians were sticklers about theological instruction and the proper credentialing of their ministers. Many of their churches, known as Meeting Houses, were forced to share circuit riding preachers only a couple of times a month.

When Reverend Stobo rowed ashore, the weather turned nasty and the gale that had dismasted his ship reformed, and this time it capsized the vessel within sight of the City. All souls on board perished, including Stobo's wife and children. Perhaps the Godly man took this storm to be an omen that he should remain in Charleston and do the Lord's work, or possibly Stobo was frightened out of his wits of ever going aboard a ship again. As New World fortune would have it, Reverend Stobo married Jean Bulloch, daughter of recent Scot immigrant James Bulloch.

Some evidence leads historians to believe that James was a local attorney practicing in the City. Reverend Archibald Stobo moved out to John's Island and established the John's Island Presbyterian Church for the numerous dissenters that populated the sea islands south of Charleston.

James and Jean Bulloch had a son that they named Archibald in honor of his maternal grandfather, and that male issue was the early ancestor of our 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. Archibald Bulloch became an attorney, probably having read law in his father's Charleston office. He was an officer of both the court and the local militia and no doubt was a supporter of James Oglethorpe's settlement in Georgia.

There is speculation as to whetherArchibald Stobo Bulloch was a young widower when he departed Charleston for Savannah at age 34.

He quickly became a man of consequence in the new colony of Georgia. One of the legendary beauties of Savannah was Judge James Deveaux's daughter, Mary, and Archibald Bulloch,Esq., lost no time in making her his wife. The Deveauxs were major landholders in Georgia and had connections all along the eastern seaboard.

An ardent Whig and a splendid orator, Archibald Bulloch was a frequent speaker at Tondee's Tavern, a hotspot of revolutionary fervor in colonial Savannah. Tondee's Tavern was to that city what Shepherd's Tavern on Broad Street was to Charleston in the run-up to the American Revolution -- a gathering spot for hot-bloods to harangue Parliament.

From Tondee's Tavern to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Archibald Bulloch was an officer in Colonel Lachlan Macintosh's regiment of partisans who made numerous dangerous forays against British forces around coastal Georgia.

In early 1777 Bulloch was given absolute political and military authority in Georgia due to the drastic circumstances of the war. Shortly thereafter, Archibald S. Bulloch was found dead and the suspicion is that he was poisoned by Tories. However, his offspring survived the revolution and prospered in the new Republic which took shape in the 1790s.

The Georgia lady who married Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., in 1853 was the great-grand-daughter of Archibald Bulloch of Charleston and Savannah. She was the great-great-great-grand-daughter of Archibald Stobo, the renown Presbyterian minister of 18th century Charleston. By 1853 the Bulloch family owned plantations throughout Georgia, but the family seat was Bulloch Hall in Roswell, outside of Atlanta.

The historian, David McCullouch, in his biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., entitled Mornings On Horseback (2001), notes that Margaret Mitchell used aspects of Martha Bulloch Roosevelt's early life as a model for the character Scarlet O'Hara and that Bulloch Hall off Jones Road in Roswell was a model for Tara in the novel, Gone With The Wind (1936). Martha's brothers served as blockade runners in the Confederacy, and one brother was an ensign on Raphael Semme's famed raider, C.S.S. Alabama.

For Thee Roosevelt, the name that Teddy's father went by, marrying Martha Bulloch in 1853 was a uniting of two of the most prominent families in America. Martha's upbringing spanned the Old South and New England. Naturally, her children by marriage to Thee Roosevelt imbibed all the romance associated with the antebellum South.

Teddy Roosevelt penned his autobiography long after his presidency, and he recorded of his southern mother, "My mother, Martha Bulloch, was a sweet, gracious, beautiful Southern woman, a delightful companion and beloved by everybody. She was entirely 'unreconstructed' (sympathetic to the Southern Confederate cause) to the day of her death."

Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com.