Larry Page Family History

Lawrence Edward Page, better known as the Google co-founder Larry Page, was born on March 26, 1973 to Carl and Gloria Page in Lansing, Michigan.  His father was a computer science professor at Michigan State University; while his mother taught computer programming there.   Larry is the younger of their two sons.

So computers were with Larry from an early age.  When he was six, his father brought home an Exidy Sorcerer computer which he soon mastered and began using for schoolwork.  His older brother Carl taught him to take things apart.  Before long he was taking everything in his house apart to see how they all worked.

He has said: “From a very early age I realized that I wanted to invent things. So I became interested in technology and business.  Probably from when I was twelve or so I knew I was going to start a company eventually.”

Larry graduated in Computer Science with a BSc from the University of Michigan and an MSc from Stanford University in California.  He then started on a PhD program at Stanford.  He didn’t finish it.

Larry and Sergey.  It was at Stanford’s PhD program in 1995 that Larry first met Sergey Brin.  Sergey had been born in Moscow but in 1979 had come to America as a child with his father, a Russian mathematics professor.

Larry and Sergey started to collaborate on a problem emerging for the Worldwide Web industry.  How to set up an effective search engine?  There were online companies such as Yahoo that had tried, but not very successfully.

What Larry and Sergey achieved while still at Stanford was to develop their PageRank algorithm.  They relied on a new technology in order to analyze the relevance of the backlinks that connected one web page to another.  And they soon realized that such an algorithm could be used to build a search engine that was far superior to the existing ones on the market.

Google.  In 1998 Google was born in a garage in Menlo Park, California to commercialize their discovery.  Seed money was soon forthcoming and they moved into larger premises in Mountain View.

Their first major coup came in 2000 when Yahoo selected Google to be its primary search provider.  From that time onward Google’s share of the search market steadily rose until they came to dominate.

Larry and Sergey were quirky and their Google started up quirkily.  The tech reporter Kara Swisher had the following initial impressions of them:

“Page was terse while Brin never stopped talking.  Page was grave while Brin was the comic relief.  Page was sharp-tongued while Brin aimed for sweetness.  Both were indeed odd.”

Neither craved the limelight.  Consequently they sought out an experienced tech executive to head up Google.  In 2001 Eric Schmidt was brought in from Sun Microsystems as its CEO.

Under Schmidt’s leadership, Google underwent a period of major growth and expansion, including its successful IPO in 2004.  Eric stepped down as CEO in 2011.

Larry Page then resumed as CEO.  He held that position for eight years until he stepped down in 2019.  But he had really dropped back from public view much earlier.  He had not presented at product launches or at earnings calls since 2013; and he had not been on any press conference since 2015.

Post Google.  Since his time at Google Larry has pursued other interests.  His new AI-related startups reflect one side of him.  But his acquisition of private islands, such as Eustatia in the British Virgin Islands, shows his desire for privacy and for distance from public scrutiny.

Pages in Tennessee

The Rev. John Page.  Larry’s paternal lineage began with the Rev. John Page.

He was born in Fauquier county, Virginia in 1766.  By 1790 this pioneering minister had crossed into Tennessee.  There he married Celia Douglass, the daughter of one of the first magistrates in Sumner county, Tennessee.

For most of the rest of his life, he was a circuit-riding minister in Tennessee for the Methodist Episcopal church.  His home base was Middle Tennessee, in Sumner county until 1804 and then in Smilth county.  Despite his numerous travels he and Celia were the parents of no fewer than thirteen children.

He stopped riding and preaching in his sixties around 1833.  By that time he had amassed a considerable amount of property, iincluding a general store in Carthage.  This enabled him to live comfortably for the rest of his life.  He was ninety-two when he died in 1859.

Later Pages.  Larry’s line in Tennessee from the Rev. John Page ran as follows:

• John D. Page (1818-1900)
• Henry Horace Page (1872-1932)
• and Carl Davis Page (1905-1963) .

John D. Page was one of the younger of the Rev. John Page’s children.  Born in 1818 in Smith county, he was by trade a shoemaker.  Some time later he migrated north to Union City, a town that had been created in 1854 at the crossing of two major railroads  It soon became a commercial hub for the county’s sawmills and furniture business.

John’s marriage and children came late.  He was fifty-four when his son Henry was born.

In the 1890’s Henry Page and his younger brother John both married Pardue girls.  John remained with his wife Emily in Union City.  But Henry and Annie later moved onto Annie’s hometown of Jackson in Madison county in the western part of the state.

They raised seven children, five boys and two girls being born between 1900 and 1915.  Only one of them moved away from Tennessee.  That was Carl Davis Page, Larry’s grandfather.

Pages in Michigan

Carl Davis Page left Tennessee for Michigan to seek out employment in the auto industry.  He found it with General Motors at Flint.  In 1937 he participated in a 44-day sit-down strike which resulted in GM having to recognize the workers’ union.  He continued working for GM during World War Two making camshafts.

His son Carl Victor Page, born in 1938, survived childhood polio – thanks to the physical therapy he received.  He was the first in his family to graduate from high school and the first to attend college.  Indeed at the University of Michigan he progessed from a BSc in Engineering to a PhD in the new field of computer science which he completed in 1965.  A teaching career at Michigan State University followed.

Carl died from pneumonia in 1996 at the youngish age of fifty-eight.

“A pioneer and world authority in computer science,  Carl Page was a prolific scholar and beloved teacher and mentor to innumerable students.  His dedication to opportunity and education for everyone made him a lifelong supporter of the Democratic party.”

Carl’s two sons both became tech entrepreneurs.  His younger son Larry, born in 1973, took his father’s computer work a huge step forward with his company Google.

A Jewish Mother

Larry’s mother Gloria is Jewish.  Her grandparents Benjamin and Yetta Weinstein had arrived in New York from Brest-Litovsk in the old Russian empire in the early 1900’s.  They settled in Newark, New Jersey.

Gloria Weinstein, Benjamin’s granddaughter, was born in 1944 and grew up in Newark.  Her father Samuel later left for Israel where he died.  Meanwhile Gloria embarked on a teaching career in computing which took her to Miichigan where she met and married Carl Page.  They  divorced in 1981.  After the divorce Gloria had jobs with a number of companies as a software engineer.

Larry Page’s Family Tree

• Tennessee

• John D. Page from Smith county moved to Union City and m. Emily Sullivan (1834-1910) there in 1872
• – Henry Page (1872-1932)
• – John B. Page (1874-1918) m. Emily Pardue in 1895

• Henry Horace Page m. Annie Drucilla Pardue from Madison county (1876-1932) in Union City in 1898 and later moved to Jackson, Madison county
• – Henry Page (1900-1965)  m. Irma Walker
• – Norman Page (1903-1975) m. Jessie Whittle
• – Carl Page (1905-1963), moved to Michigan
• – Luther Page (1907-1983) m. Helen Moore
• – Mary Page (1909-1963) m. Everett Dunbar
• – Aileen Page (1912-1994) m. James Orr
• – Frank Page (1915-1950) m. Alene Pate

• Larry Page from Lansing, Michigan moved to Silicon Valley and m. Lucinda Southworth (b. 1979) on Necker Island in the Caribbean in 2007
• – first child (b. 2009)
• – second child (b. 2011)