Opening paragraphs...............

In the early 1900's, as Rockefeller vied with Andrew Carnegie for the title of the world's richest man, a spirited rivalry arose between France and Germany, with each claiming to be Rockefeller's ancestral land.  Assorted genealogists stood ready, for a sizable fee, to manufacture a splendid royal lineage for the oilman.  "I have no desire to trace myself back to the nobility," he said honestly.  "I am satisfied with my good old American stock."  The most ambitious search for Rockefeller's roots traced them back to a ninth-century French family, the Roquefeuilles, who supposedly inhabited a Languedoc chateau.  The clan's departure from France is much better documented than its origins.  After Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the Huguenot family fled from religious persecution and emigrated to Sagendorf, near the Rhenish town of Koblenz, and Germanized their surname to Rockefeller.
-Ron Chernow, Titan:  The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.