Genealogy as a credit score

From A treasury of American anecdotes; sly, salty, shaggy stories of heroes and hellions, beguilers and buffoons, spellbinders and scapegoats, gagsters and gossips, from the grassroots and sidewalks of America by Benjamin Albert Botkin. 

There is a story in Boston that in the palmy days of the twenties a Chicago banking house asked the Boston investment firm of Lee, Higginson & Co. for a letter of recommendation about a young Bostonian they were considering employing. Lee, Higginson could not say enough for the young man. His father, they wrote, was a Cabot, his mother a Lowell; farther back his background was a happy blend of Saltonstalls, Appletons, Peabodys, and others of Boston’s First Families. The recommendation was given without hesitation.

Several days later came a curt acknowledgment from Chicago. Lee, Higginson was thanked for its trouble. Unfortunately, however, the material supplied on the young man was not exactly of the type the Chicago firm was seeking. “We were not,” their letter declared, “contemplating using Mr.-for breeding purposes.”