Jeff Bezos Family History

Jeff Bezos the Amazon proprietor was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on January 12th, 1964 to Ted and Jackie Jorgensen in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Ted was a young Danish American unicycle hockey player.

Jeff’s birth name did not last long.  Jackie left her husband to live with her parents, filing for divorce in June 1965 when Jeff was 17 months old. After the divorce Jackie married the Cuban immigrant Miguel (Mike) Bezos.  Shortly after the wedding, Mike adopted the 4-year-old Jeff whose surname was then legally changed from Jorgensen to Bezos.

Jeff did not stay long in Albuquerque.  In 1968, when Mike had received his degree from the University of Albuquerque and joined the oil company Exxon, the family moved to Houston and, later on, to Miami.

Jeff, a bright student, attended Princeton University where he graduated summa cum laude in 1986 with a BSE in engineering.  Eight years later, he reached the age of thirty and had success on Wall Street – in fintech, banking, and with a hedge fund company.  But something was missing.

Amazon – The Early Years.  In the spring of 1994 Jeff had read with great interest that web usage was growing at an exponential rate.  He thought that he should exploit that fact and set up an online bookstore.  Leaving his hedge fund job, he founded his new company Amazon in a rented garage in Bellevue, Washington in July of that year.

The financial support he received from his parents helped Jeff start the company.  During the dot.com bubble years, it prospered and attracted much public attention.  In 1998, three years after launching Amazon, he was able to take it public with an IPO.  He used the new equity money to acquire companies and to expand Amazon’s range of online sales.

But Amazon was not making any money.  In 2002, with the collapse of the dot.com bubble, the company almost went bankrupt.

And Later.  Amazon did rebound from this crisis, in the following year recording its first profit.

Amazon began as an online bookstore and successfully expanded into a variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (Amazon is a major investor in the AI startup Anthropic).  It has indeed become the world’s largest online sales company and the largest Internet company by revenue.

What Jeff has achieved with Amazon probably exceeds earlier American retail marketers – such as Montgomery Ward with his 19th century mail order catalogs and even Sam Walton with his Walmart stores.

Jeff has interests outside of Amazon.  Like other tycoons such as Richard Branson and Elon Musk, he became interested in space.  In 2000 he founded his spaceflight company Blue Origin which has now made space flights.  And he acquired The Washington Post newspaper in 2013, now seen as a somewhat controversial purchase.

Jeff Bezos and Albuquerque

The making of Jeff Bezos as an individual was the city of Albuquerque in New Mexico.  This American place in the desert was the fusion of the three ethnic strands in him:

• the German Gise side, as represented by his grandfather Preston (present there from 1961 to 1968) and by his mother Jackie who grew up there
• the (briefly) Danish Jorgensen side from his biological father Ted, the unicyclist who quickly left the scene
• and the more substantial Spanish/Cuban Bezos side from his adopted father Miguel (Mike) who studied at the University of Albuquerque.

Jeff did not stay in Albuquerque that long.  He left in 1968 at a young age after his adopted father Mike had accepted a job offer with Exxon.  But his fiancee Lauren Sanchez, whom he first started dating in 2018, was also born in Albuquerque and grew up there.

Maternal Gises

The maiden name of Jeff’s mother Jackie was Gise.  This surname was originally Geiss and was German.  Its meaning is unclear.  Some have the name as a variant of geis, meaning “a goatherd.”  Geiss could become Gise or Geis in America.

There are some 2,300 Geisses in Germany today.  They are mainly in SW Germany – in Hesse, Baden-Wurttemberg and Bavaria – where 75 percent of the Geisses are to be found.

Geiss/Gise in Pennsylvania.  Jeff’s Geiss line who came to America were from Wetteraukreis in Hesse.

Johann Heinrich Geiss, born in 1713, made the journey sometime in the 1760’s.  For him and his family, departing probably to escape religious persecution, they would have left behind their home and traveled up the Rhine in small boats to Rotterdam.  There they would have embarked on a ship to take them across the Atlantic to Philadelphia.  It was a lengthy and sometimes risky journey.

Johann settled in Lehigh, Pennsylvania.  Jeff’s line from him and his wife Anna ran as follows:

• Johann (John) Geiss (1737-1793) who married  Anna Kneer (1748- 1831) in 1766
• Abraham Geiss (1770-1849) who married Anna Gise (1772-1857) in Adams county
• David Geiss or Gise (1812-1899) who married Sarah Kerlin (1814-1859) in Adams county

Gise in the Midwest.  David Gise worked in the mill trade in his native Pennsylvania prior to the Civil War.  Following the death of his wife Sarah, he married her widowed sister Catherine and migrated west with the family in 1867 to Illinois.  They made their home in Manhattan, a small village in Will county.

In 1872 his son Daniel and wife Amanda moved to the nearby town of Joliet.  This was a place that had started to boom because of its steel mill.  Daniel ran his business there – Gise & Co – which sold manufactured products to the jobbing and retail trade from his shop on Washington Street.

Sometime aound 1902 Daniel moved again, this time to the town of Girard in Crawford county, Kansas.  This again was an industrial town, first a mill town and then a coal mining town.  But Daniel’s main interest there was in real estate.  He died in 1912.

Daniel’s son Lloyd Preston was born in Joliet in 1873 and married his first wife Emma in 1903.  Sadly she died only four years later.  In 1912 he married for a second time – to Mabel Hall – and moved to her hometown in Dimmit, south Texas.

But this marriage did not last.  Mabel later remarried in Los Angeles, with her younger son Alvin there with her.  Lloyd Preston did not remarry and moved east to Virginia in the 1930’s.  When he died in 1958 at the age of eighty-four, he requested that he be buried with his parents at their cemetery in Crawford, Kansas.

Preston Gise.  Lawrence Preston Gise, Jackie’s father, was born in 1915 and was the eldest son of Lloyd Preston and Mabel.  He was known to his friends as Preston and to his family as Pop.

He had grown up in south Texas and married Mattie Strait there in 1935 (Mattie is a relation of the country singer George Strait).

Following his father, Preston then moved to Washington DC.  After service with the US Navy in World War Two, he joined the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the federal agency that managed the nation’s nuclear weapons program.  Later he would help form the Pentagon’s supersecret Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

He came to AEC’s Albuquerque Operations Office in New Mexico in 1961 and worked there as its manager until his retirement in 1968.  Afterwards he and his wife Mattie retired to Mattie’s family ranch in south Texas.  Preston died in 1995.

Preston and Mattie had two children, Lawrence Preston Jr. and Jacklyn.

Preston Jr. was born before the war in 1936.  He married in Virginia and during the 1960’s worked for General Mills in Minneapolis.  He later managed a toy company in Minnesota.  He died there in 1995, two months before his father died.

Meanwhile Jacklyn (or Jackie) arrived in 1946 after Preston Sr. had returned from active service in the war.

Preston and Mattie lived through all of Jackie’s traumas – her pregnancy while still at high school, the marriage that did not work out because of his drinking, and Jackie’s return to live with them –  in their last few years in New Mexico before Preston’s retirement.

Jackie and Miguel.  After her divorce Jackie took a job working in the bookkeeping department of the Bank of New Mexico.  There she met Miguel (later Mike) Bezos who was working the overnight shift while he attended the University of Albuquerque.  They married in 1967 and had two further children themselves, Mark and Christina.

Their life together was one of upward achievement.  Mike joined Exxon and climbed through its ranks as a petroleum engineer and manager.  He worked for them in Houston, Miami, and overseas.

In 1995, when he and Jackie were in Miami, their son Jeff had moved to Seattle and planned his online business.  They were confident enough in his abilities at that time to lend him $245,000.  This was the basis for his launching of Amazon. That investment was to be hugely rewarded.

Mike spent his entire working career with Exxon, from 1968 to 2000.  After his retirement in 2000 he and Jackie set up the Bezos Family Foundation as a philanthropic concern.

Paternal Jorgensens

Jorgensen is a patronymic name of Danish origin.  Ted Jorgensen’s paternal grandfather Johannes Jorgensen, a Danish veteran of the Spanish-American War, had arrived in Chicago in 1892 at the age of twenty.

Ted himself was born into the Baptist family of Ted and Dolores Jorgensen in Chicago in 1944.  After his father took a purchasing job at Sandia National Laboratories, the family moved to Bernalillo, New Mexico.  As a teenager and young adult, Ted was both a hobbyist and a professional unicyclist, one who competed in unicycle hockey as a member of the Albuquerque Unicycle Club – the world’s first unicycle hockey club.

He was nineteen and Jackie seventeen when their son Jeff was conceived.  After their divorce in 1965, Ted agreed to discontinue contact with her and also to relinquish custody for young Jeff.  He moved to Glendale, Arizona where he ran a bike shop.  He married his wife Linda in 1988 and died in 2015.  He knew nothing of what had happened with Jeff.

Paternal Bezos

Bezos is a Spanish name.  In Spanish it means “kisses.” It is not a very common surname. Those with that name number only four hundred in Spain today.  The surname seems to have originated in the tiny Castilian village of Palazuela de Vedija in Valladolid province.

Jeff’s Bezos family history in the nearby village of Villafrechós (population of 500 today) started when Jose Bezos, reportedly a pig farmer, married a woman from Villafrechós in 1780.  His Bezos ancestors were present in the village since that time.

Salvador Bezos was born there in 1906.  But times were hard then and his family decided to emigrate to Cuba in 1910.  Salvador did later return to the village.  Then he left again in the 1920’s, marrying and settling in Santiago, Cuba.

Meanwhile Teodoro Bezos – an unrelated Bezos – left Villafrechós for Argentina in 1908.  He had a son named Joaquin who became a well-known Argentine footballer.

Jeff visited this village in 2011, unannounced and with bodyguards.  He met residents with the Bezos name who claimed to be his relatives in some form or another, although without corroborative evidence.  He did not return.

Salvador and Miguel Bezos in Cuba.  Jeff’s adopted father Miguel was born in 1945 to Salvador and Cesarea Bezos in Santiago, Cuba.  He was raised with an older brother and sister.  His father owned a lumber mill.  His mother was a part-time shopkeeper selling fabric and infant clothing.  They were reasonably well off.

His parents had been supporters of Fidel Castro until Castro seized the family’s lumber business.  Their older son Salvador had already left for America.  How about their younger son Miguel?

They applied for a US refugee visa for Miguel.  He was young enough to get out of the country by this means. Their application was successful and Miguel left them in July 1962 for an unknown future in America.

Miguel/Mike Bezos in America.  Miguel had left Havana and arrived in Miami at the age of sixteen under America’s Peter Pan Operation refugee program.

Miguel recalled about the time he left Cuba that his parents were not allowed to accompany him to the airport and that he was only allowed to take three changes of clothes.  This included a jacket made of rags that his mother had sewn for him in order to protect him from the so-called cold weather of Miami.  This was a souvenir that Miguel kept.

Alone and penniless in Miami, Miguel only knew one English word – hamburger.  But through grit and determination, he got a college education and climbed through the ranks of the US oil company Exxon as a petroleum engineer and manager.  A truly immigrant success story.

His son Jeff was later to say that Miguel (or Mike as he became) was his role model.  “I think in every immigrant you’ll find a deep optimism and a deep resilience too.  My dad is an intensely hard worker.  He is warm and he teaches with an easy smile.”

Jeff Bezos’s Family Tree

• Maternal Gise Line

• Daniel Gise from Lebanon, Pennsylvania m. Amanda Kearns (1847-1928) in Mifflin, Pennsylvania in 1870.  They migrated westward, first to Joliet, Illinois in 1872 and then to Crawford, Kansas in 1902.
• – Ward Gise (1870-1944) m. Cora Harris
• – Lloyd Gise (1873-1958)
• – Beulah Gise (1877-1948) m. Robert Beattie
• – Edith Gise (1881-1958) m. William Taylor

• Lloyd Preston Gise from Joliet, Illinois m. Emma Groth from Wisconsin (1879-1907) in Joliet in 1903; rem. Rebecca Mabel Hall from Texas (1890-1977) in Dimmit, Texas in 1912, later divorced.
• – Raymond (Ray) Gise (1904-1993), born in Illinois – with Emma
• – Preston Gise (1915-1995), born in Texas – with Mabel
• – Alvin (Al) Gise (1921-2004), born in Kansas – with Mabel

• Jacklyn (Jackie) Gise from Bernalillo, New Mexico m. Theodore (Ted) Jorgensen,  unicyclist (1944-2015) in Albuquerque in 1963, divorced in 1965; rem. Miguel (Mike) Bazos from Cuba (b. 1945) in Albuquerque in 1967.  They later moved to Houston and Miami
• – Jeff Bezos (b. 1964), Amazon entrepreneur, with Ted
• – Marcus (Mark) Bezos (b. 1968) m. Lisa Rogers, advertising executive, with Miguel
• – Christina Bezos (b. 1969) m. Stephen Poore, with Miguel

• Jeff Bezos from Albuquerque m. Mackenzie Scott Tuttle, writer and novelist from San Francisco (b. 1970)  in 1993 and in the following year moved to Seattle where Jeff founded Amazon.  They divorced in 2019.  Jeff became engaged to Lauren Sanchez, Mexican-American journalist from Albuquerque (b. 1969)  in 2023.
• – Preston Bezos (b. 2000), with Mackenzie
• – two further sons, with Mackenzie
• – plus one daughter (adopted from China), with Mackenzie
• – plus three children – Nikko, Evan, and Ella – with Lauren from previous relationships.