[AnAmericanMother]

No way will three generations do it. The old saying is, "You can't buy a grandfather."

A good deal depends on how the "new money" is earned. Respectable professions like banking, medicine, or law will turn the family in a shorter time than entertainment (vide your Oprah example). Hoteliers and restaurateurs are doubtful. My grandmother would still be calling the Hiltons "nouveaux riches" (although only under her breath to close friends).

Her family was very poor when she was growing up, living in a shotgun house on a side street in Augusta, GA . . . but she was descended from the brother of a Signer and one of the first families of Charleston SC as well. No amount of poverty will erase the cachet of being from an old Charleston family (BTW the family fortune was lost when her grandmother's father and mother died in a yellow fever epidemic, and the estate was consumed caring for the minor children). She married well and started that side of the family back up to prosperity. Oddly enough, she was college educated and a bacteriologist at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta before she married.

[Congressman Billybob]

I was reading through this interesting thread, because you pinged me about your accurate memory of my impressions of John Kerry at Yale. Then I read your post that I'm replying to, now.

Charles Linn, one of the creators of the Charleston Cotillion, was also the creator of the City of Birmingham. His daughter, Annie Linn, married one of his colleagues, John Henley, Sr, who'd been a Colonel in the SCA. His son, JH Jr., married Lamira Parker of Tennessee.

One of her daughters, Annie Linn Henley, was my grandmother. So, my connections with that fine old city, Charleston, is also reasonably good. LOL.

John / Billybob