The debut issue of The New York Times on Sept. 18, 1851, known then as The New-York Daily Times, contained one wedding announcement, and one wedding announcement only, for the newlyweds Sarah Mullett and John Grant. He was 26 and she was 23. The ceremony took place at the Trinity Episcopal Church in Fredonia, the town in western New York where the bride had grown up. The bridegroom was from Jamestown. They were married Sept. 10 (though from the smudgy looks of the article, the Times reporter got it wrong and reported Sept. 15), by the Rev. T. P. Tyler. The announcement was a mere sentence, a bare-bones beginning for a Times institution.

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So why were John and Sarah the chosen ones?

Based on old newspaper clippings and census reports, it appears that the Mulletts were a prominent family in Fredonia. The bride’s father, James, epitomized upward mobility. He grew up on a farm in Vermont, the oldest of 13 children, and made his way to Fredonia, where he became a self-taught lawyer (such a thing was possible in those days). He eventually became a State Supreme Court justice.

The bridegroom was a cousin of Ulysses S. Grant, then an Army lieutenant, who would go on to become a general and president.

Today, oil portraits of John and Sarah hang side by side in the New Haven family room of Wendy Grant Haskell, 63, who is a psychotherapist and the Grants’ great-great-granddaughter. Each is wearing black, and a similarly dour and humorless expression, as if they had whispered to each other beforehand, “Don’t smile!”

“I think they are trying to project importance, status and prestige,” Ms. Haskell said, adding that the portraits were probably painted soon after the wedding.

(When I first called Ms. Haskell to inquire about John and Sarah Grant, she was flummoxed; I think she thought I was trying to sell her a Times subscription. When I explained my reason for calling, she said she had no idea the Grants had appeared in the newspaper’s first wedding announcement. “What a hoot!”)

See the announcement in the first issue of The New-York Daily Times.

Her brother David Marshall Grant, an actor you might recognize from “The Devil Wears Prada" or his Tony-nominated performance as Joe Pitt in “Angels in America,” said: “I would guess, looking at those portraits, that it was a less joyful time. I’m sure there were struggles just to get by. I can’t imagine what it was like just to make breakfast. I’m angry when there’s a line at Starbucks.”

John and Sarah Grant’s lives probably did not turn out exactly as they envisioned. After the wedding, they settled in Jamestown, where John was co-owner of a grocery store dealing in tea, fruit, molasses and salt, among other products. Sarah kept house, according to the census, and had a live-in Irish servant. The couple had one son, James Mullett Grant, who married and also had one son, Havens Grant. Then, sometime before the turn of the century, James Mullett Grant traveled alone to Havana and never returned.

“John and Sarah Grant were all about the promise of being a really significant couple starting a whole line of prosperity, but then look at what happened,” Ms. Haskell said. “Their son fell off the edge of the earth.”

On June 2, 1883, John Grant’s obituary appeared in The Evening Observer, a local newspaper. As brief and terse as his wedding announcement, the notice merely reported that he had “dropped dead” in his home at age 60. Sarah Grant died 29 years later.

Then things got even more interesting.

The couple’s grandson, Havens Grant, went to Yale, became a lawyer in New York City, married a free-spirited poet and ran a moonshine business on the side during Prohibition.

Today, the Grant descendants gather every Christmas at Ms. Haskell’s home in Connecticut and take a family photo with John and Sarah’s portraits in the background. In a recent photograph, everyone is wearing colorful tie-dyed scarves or shirts. David Marshall Grant appears with his husband, KC Reischerl, and their daughter, Evelyn May Reischerl Grant, who is 6 and the youngest descendant. She is also the only female family member in the photo. Ms. Haskell’s three sons are gay and appear with their partners.

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Ms. Haskell’s son David Haskell is an editor at New York magazine and is carrying on the family moonshine tradition. He is a co-owner of Kings County Distillery, which is based in Brooklyn Navy Yard and makes craft whiskeys.

What would John and Sarah Grant think? If they were to see the lineup of gay couples in tie-dye, David Marshall Grant said, “I think they would think they had gone to Mars; it’s an astonishing example of what happens in time.”

Lois Smith Brady wrote the Vows column from its inception in 1992 to 2001, when she moved to Aspen, Colo. She still occasionally writes Vows columns.

Editor’s note: There is some debate about the date of the portraits pictured above. Are they from 1851 or 1830-something? Do they depict John and Sarah Grant or earlier ancestors? Read more here.