A descendant of William Muncy, Frank Andrew Munsey grew up in Maine and lived in New York where he became rich and famous. I won’t repeat all of the details that you can read here in Wikipedia, but he was definitely the most prominent man of the early 20th Century to bear the Munsey name. He made money in dime novels, invented pulp fiction, owned newspapers, and Munsey Magazine. He became very rich due to his hard work and ambition and became a friend of President Teddy Roosevelt, but he admitted near the end of his life that money does not bring happiness.
Before his death Munsey himself summed up his life this way: “I have no heirs. I am disappointed in my friendships. . . . I have forty million dollars, but what has it brought me? Not happiness.”
Frank Andrew Munsey was very interested in his past and his ancestors, and we are fortunate that he hired D.O.S. Lowell to prepare a genealogy – “A Munsey-Hopkins Genealogy: Being the Ancestry of Andrew Chauncey Munsey and Mary Jane Merritt Hopkins” (the parents of Frank Muncy.) The book is now in the public domain and a reprint can be obtained through Amazon. The Munsey portion of the book is available here at Muncy Family Info – a free 10MB download.
D.O.S. Lowell was a very learned and respected genealogist. He was careful in his research and despite the obvious attempts in the book to flatter the family of Frank Andrew Munsey, we should be thankful that this book was commissioned. We don’t know a lot about the early descendants of William Muncy, and we would know a lot less without this book. Descendants of William Muncy will definitely want to review the section on the Munsey family.