Robert Charles Guillemin (1939-05-04 – 2015-01-26), known by his pen name Sidewalk Sam, was a famous street artist and my third cousin, once removed, being the great-grandson of Mary, daughter of Daniel Riley and Ellen Donovan. He is related to me in a matrilineal line and thus shared my mitochondrial haplogroup H1c8.

In 1994, he fell 30 feet while working on his roof and became paralyzed from the waist down. He continued to draw artwork from his wheelchair.

Family

Sidewalk Sam was the son of Victor Guillemin Jr. and Ilene A. Whall (1906–1979). Ilene was the daughter of William Joseph B. Whall and Mary Florence Hayes (1872–1960). Mary was the daughter of Michael Hayes and Mary Riley.

He had three siblings. His brother Victor William Guillemin (*1937) is a retired mathematics professor at MIT. His sister Marie Jeanne Raphael (*1942) is the wife of leftist historian Ray Raphael, who attended Reed College as an undergraduate and UC Berkeley as a graduate, exactly like me. Ray and Marie had two sons, although one died in 2003 aged 26; the group Nick’s Interns was created in his memory.^ref The other sibling is Richard Ernest Guillemin (*1940).

Sidewalk Sam married twice. First was to Jeanne Garrigan, who he had his only children, twin sons, with, and later divorced. He remarried to Tina Green, who survived him. He has two grandchildren.

DNA

There are apparently no remaining female female-line descendants of Mary (Hayes) Whall who could bear children, so the mitochondrial line is destined to go extinct under her.

I have DNA matches to descendants of Mary Whall’s older sister Ellen (Hayes) McGivney, who had a larger family.

Ancestry

See

• Obituary.
• Sidewalk Sam on Wikipedia.